Hah CK, looks like one of my old posts when I first came here. As for your critique, you can't really say all of those things are wrong with the piece, because all of those things you mentioned are personal preference. You might not like the glow, maybe Spider does.

Your critique there is pretty detailed. I could understand you denoting so many points that you think need correcting if you were looking at a piece by an artist at depthcore, but tearing apart his first wallpaper to the extent that you have seems like its beyond the point of being helpful. The thing is, looking at the piece, my guess is that spider is pretty new to Cinema4D. I would also bet that if he wasn't new, many of the things you pointed out wouldn't be an issue.

I know you're just telling him what's wrong so that he can fix those things and get the most out of the piece. But, at his level of experience with the program, I don't think its supportive or useful to him to tell him every single thing he did 'wrong.' Instead, it would be much more beneficial to him if you told him general areas he could improve and gave him suggestions on what would look better.

For example, with the lighting issue instead of telling him how the lighting doesn't work, you might suggest that he use multiple lights. Use a flood light, a back light, a source of natural light, and a main light. The main light is where the majority of the light comes from, it has the strongest light and the sharpest/darkest shadows. The back light is a light opposite the camera. A flood light is a light off to the side that, like the back light and natural light, have a low intensity with either soft to no shadows. The natural light should be a light that covers the whole scene with soft light that you may want to give a slight tint of light blue or light yellow. Make sure it has very soft shadows. Something like that would benefit him much more than telling him that his lighting isn't doing anything and is just looking ugly.

As for that blur, its not a bad idea, it just needs to be used better. Its meant to look like depth of field. What you should do instead, spider, is duplicate the layer that you have your render on, give it a nice guassian blur over the whole thing. Then, put a layer mask on it, and use a gradient (black and white obviously) to fade the blur out wherever it needs to. That way the blur is gradual and the juxtaposition isn't so sudden.

CK, your comment wasn't bad, you had good intentions. Its just that I'm sure it would help more if you told him less of whats wrong and more of what can he do to make it right