i like your lighting author

That skull is awesome!

very nice and clean render..!

Very good work, luck

wow, very well done!

I don't really enjoy the material of the chess pieces, but the water, reflection and all the rest is very nice work.

Nice image I don’t mind the textures, more interested in the work as whole, there are a couple of things that are bothering me, the orange streak in the B.G. what is it and way is it there (not in the visible in the S.B.S) and the main chess piece should be vertical not leaning back as it is, I can see know reason for it. (Not unless it's just about to fall still looks odd)

@ Warlock: the leaning has to with the fact the camera is in a close-up position, the yellow streak is coming from light shining through a glass which stands there (look at SBS step 14).

The main thing was the chess piece and the reason I pointed It out was as far as i could remember, the softwear you are using has a fundamental problem with camera FOV (field of view) is not at all accurate, so setting a FOV of 90 makes a shot less than 90 degrees on the horizontal vertical axis in other words, the rendered view is incorrect....i may be wrong tho this may have been corrected in newer versions.no disrespect mean

Edit: sorry forgot to add that this can be corrected by using 112.5 degrees

Thanks so much Warlock for the help, adjusted some settings and rendered it again. Looks much better.

Your help has been very much appriciated!

Looks much better...and you're very welcome glad it helped!

awesome

sence they took mine down which was (water of earth) im putting my money on u man lol

Very good job. looks great

very nice work...good luck

Very nice, well done. Good luck

Good work.

Congrats great work!

Congrats Rob terrific work

Congrats on first place

Congrats for 1st

congrats Rob

Congrats for your first place, Honey!

Thanks for the congrats and favs

I'm repeating myself here.. but 90% of the pictures need a proper background.. and this is one of them. Make a nice, clean and colorful chessboard and this will look so much better. You can also show your skills with the board.The piece itself is very clean and nicely done.

(Well, any kind of background. Be it a table, a satin cushion, some clothing or anything else..)

I'm satisfied about my background. As the contest moderator said it should look like a real macro shot. I used a "digital white box" for my background just like a photograph may do it.

Well, I'm assuming it's a glass texture and it would look a lot better with something showing through. But anyways, the piece itself is very good work, solid and clean.

Nice image, would like to see an SBS. Did you have the caustics turned on? Which render engine did you use? vray, scanline, or mentalray? Did you use any fill lights to enhance the HDR image? I do like this, I just wish you could expand on your explanation with an SBS.

I didn't use any renders in 3ds Max. Normally I Would use Mental Ray but for this clean untextured scene I used KeyShot 2 with a custom build shader.

Nice modeling, do feel that the background is lacking contrast.

cool

Good work!

Nice try...

i think the plane should extend throughout the whole image, and not have the black corners. Good luck though

very nice