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From sshaw@fas.harvard.edu:
I liked the interpretation, to go with the idea of an early historian at work. 
However, the technical limitations got in my way looking at the image.  More
might have been done with the logs in the fire, and the plane blue sky outside
of the cave.

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From Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se:
I like the concept, but I think the sky is the wrong colour. It should be
lighter and a tad more yellow/green. The parts where the cave walls meet the
ground are good, but maybe the texture should be shinier? Good work on the
glowing ashes.

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From castlewrks@aol.com:
This reminds me of Gary Lawson's "Farside" cartoons.

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From jerry@hoboes.com:
Showing the boundaries of history and prehistory was a really good idea; there
just needs to be more work on the scene itself. And perhaps more authenticity
in the cave paintings?

In order, I'd work on the sky to make it look better; then the texture of the
walls (they are awfully shiny for cave walls...), and then work on the
boundaries of the fire and the floor.
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From jull43@ij.net:
Cave drawings were prior to animal husbandry by some 
tens of thousands of years. And they were in real caves. 
The cave images are of a hunting society. And they were 
real caves not openly sunlit. 

Other than that, yes you do need a faster machine. 
Keeping that in mind ... I do not see why a rougher texture 
would not have rendered as quickly. 



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From bsieker@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de:
The overall scene does not very convincing. Here's what I think why this is:
The fire does not cast any light and its ashes are brighter that the flames.
The animals on the cave wall look like poodles ;)
The blue sky on the outside is too colorful and too uniform.
The light coming into the cave and lighting this one wall appears very
unrealistic. It pays off to fiddle with lighting and texturing a long time (i.
e. several days ...)
A good idea to be able to render more complex scenes mught be to install an
operating system (Unix), where you can have the renderer run at very low
priority in the background for days while you do other work in the foreground.
If you don't need a graphical front end this is possible with 8MB.

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From jaime@ctav.es:
The only big flaw is that the painting seems to big for the proportions of the 
human. Liked the idea (not easy to do, I know...).

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From gmccarter@hotmail.com:
Wow, smoke and flames halos must have been difficult to do on a 486.

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From ethelm@bigfoot.com:
The topic is pretty good, it is History. The image itself 
could do with a bit more polishing. The smoke does not 
look quite like smoke for instance.

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From 101741.541@compuserve.com:
Even with a 486, there's cheap improvements to bring : 
usea color_map for the cavern,
instead of plain-brown, set an interesting sky in the 
back, turn up the sunlight a bit.

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From peter@table76.demon.co.uk:
Nice fire.  I think the cave walls might look better if they were separate
heightfields.


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From r@surt.ifi.uio.no:
Very topical (now we know where history started...) :-)  The figure looks good
as well.