Recently a member of the German SR board stumbled upon this deviantart-member who claims some of the pics he shows online are actually Augmentation artwork.
I think they look quite nice.

In other news:
I dearly hope the Augmentation cover presented in Catalyst's sellsheet (PDF) is a mockup. It looks awful!
It seems the artist has very limited (if any) knowledge of SR in general and absolutely no idea of metahumans at all! Those two orks (if that's what they're supposed to be) look like Buffy-style vampires who put in their fangs upside down.

Wow, you're totally right about the buffy orks. That piece might not have been too horrible if it wasn't for that.

So they'll gonna add in some remote hand. Well, I guess that's okay.

The SM and Emergance covers changed dramatically from it's sell sheet if I remember correctly.

Ooog. Yeah, I think the only way those things will fit is if those are the new bio drones.

Sorry to disappoint, but that is the final image for the Augmentation cover though the layout and lettering may yet change. The orks are simply cyberdocs and heavily biomodded themselves.

As to the other pieces, they are indeed Augmentation artwork. I'll have to have a word with Mike about putting them out there before we do official previews.

..the internal cover looks better, right?

Bad-ass cyberbitch. I approve!

Out of curiosity, when is the pdf for Augmentation going to come out? (I'm probably going to get the hardcopy as well, but as Platonic Pimp pointed out, deadtree versions aren't searchable)

Unless, of course, the rules in Augmentation make them cool again.

Oh, they are cool, they just stink.
Rules-wise.
Augmentation only needs to finally allow you to throw a car through a troll like is the will of the great gnu.

Well I have every expectation that the inside of the book will be great. But that is one ugly cover!

Why's it ugly?

IMO, because it looks too computer generated. It's not cleaned up enough. I would expect to see that image on the SR video game, not the PP. That's just me.

Curves is good m'kay.

i agree, i just dont see them there the way i like them

So, we have a sec ... the big beef I always had with Cyberlimbs was the cost. I figured knocking them down to about 10% was ideal and they pretty much did.

So, groovy with me.

What, in return, do people have against them as-is?

(Shoudl maybe make a new thread for this, but.)

Seriously, I'd really like to hear the complaints and/or suggested fixes.

more cleavage, wider hips...

oh, you mean with the limbs? i got no idea

Personally, I find women more attractive if they have enough fat on them to have more noticable curves than does the woman in the picture. However, the fact that she falls outside my "type" is not the reason that I find the picture to be aesthetically unsatisfying. I don't get all bent out of shape when I see a picture of a car just because I don't want to put my penis in it.

There are pictures that I don't like because they actually provoke a negative response because of subject matter (like this one), but in this case it provokes a negative response because it looks unnatural.
Link removed.
After staring at the picture for far longer than I had intended to, I came to the conclusion that the problem I had with it was mostly her right leg. She's a thin woman who presumably doesn't eat a whole lot and has a high stress lifestyle - so she's not going to have the kind of handholds that I'm looking for. But let's consider what a healthy person looks like: As seen here one can expect the hip to continue to flare a bit past the hip and then gradually curve inwards towards the knee. In the cover picture, however, the leg comes off in two virtually straight lines from the hip - which is inhuman and looks off.

Also, there's no shading at the crotch. That makes it look like she doesn't actually have a joint.

-Frank

ok, to prove im not just looking at this as a perv, and to show i have some art know it's....

first, i cant tell her breast from her left shoulder. as ft says, her "hips" look like a perfect angle. thirdly, the upper cyberarms dont look like they can support the lower arm wieght.

It appears in the Probing Hand picture that the dwarf who the hand belongs to has two left hands.

Also, the Trolls/Orks that are in the background have these horrible vampire like noses that make them look demonic and monstrous, which doesn't fly in my mind as a variation of human. IMO I really don't like this cover, way too CG like, which is quite a jump from what the covers have been up to this point....

Speaking of covers, one of my favorites is the Shadows of Europe cover. That was an awesome cover.

SoE is an awesome cover.

Two left hands, THREE left hands, when you're augmented, sky's the limit, baby!

Ya I must say that the covers for street magic SR4 and Runner Havens where really good and on par with SoE. But these two past covers seem to be a stray from the over all look of the series having a flow or commonality.

I guess if you want to argue that since it is augmentation and you wanted to have a chick on the cover that did not look all that right because she is artificial then you got what you wanted.

I guess after looking at it for a bit more it could work but my guy reaction is that better work was done before this one.

Now I just hope cyber limbs are cool now so our cover girl can actually inspire in game ideas.

I am just glad to see it coming down the pipes

Taste in art is really a personal thing, not really tangible. I personally am not in love with the cover, its reminds me a little too much of a Poser rendering. But thats just me, and beyond my opinion I can't fault it.

I dig all the other stuff though, exactly what I am used to in a Shadowrun book. Good stuff.

Hmmm... Looks a little stiff and overly CG in my opinion. Of course, it's very possible that this isn't finished artwork, just a refined mockup.

Well, it looks like her lower parts were squished by a road roller - and she didn't notice that yet.

I personally don't like the picture because it looks like really crummy CGI. The lighting and colors are also way too bright to seem real. It is also very obvious that this body is a conglomeration of different parts and limbs rather than a single unified drawn body. It just looks shoddy. It also doesn't seem to keep with the color scheme of the previous edition SR4 books, though I haven't seen Emergence yet. When I first saw this picture I thought it was a poorly done mock-up. I never suspected it was the actual cover art. Sorry to be so critical, I am not trying to be rude even if I come across as such. It just really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

There could be a Troll elvis on cover with a dwarf hairpiece, as long as whats between the covers is good stuff and we get some decent representations of weapons and gear and not just text for new toys.

Ugh. I can see I'm going to have to go the PDF route with Augmentation, a real disappointment, considering my love of real, physical books. I would be outright embarrassed to lug a book with that that cover anywhere (unlike Runner Havens, which is so polished and dramatic by comparison). I have to agree with Eleazar: It looks like a cut and paste hack job. The picture is confusing (in the sense that the eye doesn't know where to go first), the proportions are all wrong, and it won't take an art student to notice that either.

On a more positive note, I like the stuff on deviantart, for the most part.

As had been mentioned before Whipstitch, generally these sorts of covers are little more than filler. Most books I can think of made in tha last few years were presented with a different cover when first "presented" before printing.

And yeah, the other art was pretty good. Very smooth.