As a coffee addict, I see the coffee cup as WAY too small!
Some have commented about the brightness, glare, but I see this as a good artistic choice - the bright screen dominating one’s life at the moment, and various comforts and practical necessities present, caught in the light, but secondary.
One little thing that bothers my eyes about the cigarette smoke is how the smoke edges line up around the lettering at the bottom of the “…ipiantes” book. Accidental alignments to occur in real life, but in art we like to see things sort of things nudged over or randomized.
Overall mood, late night work, harsh light in darkness, unhealthy habits, does catch a common situation for many since the 1980s and surley continuing well into the 21st Century.
That’s really nice. I love the floppy disk at the side, the ashtray and the cathode ray tube monitor. It takes me back to some of the places I’ve worked over the years. I also really like the brightness of the lights. When one works so long and it gets dark outside, we don’t realise how harsh the lighting in our work space can be. Very nice image.
I find these two critics too subjective. There’s no “correct angle” to show a cig, it all comes down to what the artists wants to express. Also there is no such thing as “too bright”, in the sense that the over-brightness in this image clearly artistically captures the mood of eyes adapted to dark work environment when you’re half sleeping on the night job.
Many times criticizing brightness and angles makes sense, because the beginner artists haven’t necessarily thought about them at all, but here I think all the things are carefully considered. In other words, the mood is sometimes more important, than clearness and perfectness of the image.
What am I doing here… criticizing criticizing? But it makes an interesting topic imo!
Thanks Qha. The over-brightness in the image it’s because I’ve imagined me at night programming with the full light of old monitors. I tried with less bright but the essence was lost.
I like this and if your up for critiques I think you’re getting a lot of good ones here. The corners of the keyboard look a bit too sharp to me. I think it would be really cool if the “Feature Row Gallery” was possibly very short small animated gifs or something with at least a little rotation and zooming that would make all of these beautiful Blender images really mind blowing. And they would be linked to the larger stationary image just as they are now.
I’d say that a much-better technical assessment of the image is that parts of it are “over-exposed.” These are specifically the places where a real-world light source is pointing directly at the camera. However, the rest of the exposure is quite clean, and the modeling is crisp, all of these things implying prior-experience. (In any case, very keen attention both to detail and to composition.)
I’d deal with the existing problems by breaking the problem down: the computer screen, for instance, doesn’t even need to be a light source. It can just be a curved surface with a nice, bright-blue picture on it. A separate, of-course invisible light source can suggest what “a really-illuminated screen” would do to the things that are nearby, while still another light-source actually illuminates the table. The same basic principle is true of the lamp. You want to feel like the light-bulb is bright, yet you also must be able to see it. You want to see some of the brightness-pattern that a really-illuminated thing at that position would do to the inside of the lamp housing. You want to see some suggestion of the effect on nearby objects that a really-illuminated thing at that position would plausibly do to objects on the tabletop. And, finally, the illumination of the tabletop must actually be sufficient, as well as well-balanced with other objects in the room.
So … a lot of compositing, whether you actually do it separately or do it with node-networks in whatever renderer(s) you use. Make something that the eye either agrees with, or at least, doesn’t disagree with. As they say, “if it looks good, it is good [enuf… shrink-wrap it and ship it].”
I’m simply not going to quibble about things like “the cigarette smoke.” It’s immediately obvious that the detail is a lit cigarette. The fact that the cardboard box of cigarettes is set in just the way that it is, strongly suggests a chain-smoker and is thus a storytelling detail … very nice. The steam from the coffee-cup is the same way. “It works.”
This is a nice image, made me remember my first computer almost 20 years ago, and that special sound the modem(56K) made when connecting to internet… and the floppys are still standing on the shelf and connecting dust.
Great piece! And fun! It really captures 90’s computing nostalgia.
Man, I want to add an iOmega Zip Disk drive and the DOOM installer floppies lying around.
The only choice I don’t really agree with is that the desk looks to weathered to me. Maybe lessen the bump map’s influence.
Other than that I think it’s just right as it is. I disagree with what others have said about the cigarette and brightness.
Fantastic work. Thanks for sharing!
Excellent work. Pretty realistic. I can only see something strange in the lamp. It seems the back of the lamp, outside, has a glowing effect. I think it only should come from inside.
But it makes an interesting topic imo!
