I can see what you were trying to accomplish here. Very tough scene to pull off with one render, not to mention trying to get lots of action into a portrait layout. In most compositions that require this deep perspective, you can count on three main areas to work in. Fore, mid, & background. My suggestion is to make 3 renders with the same sky/lighting to keep the main shadows consistant. You can add smaller ambient/accent lighting in the different renders. Rochr & hobbit both use these methods. Check out their work. Also check out some of the scenes in the "Grand Space Opera" at CGN, Super reference material. Foreground: Similar to what you have here, yet closer, only from the shoulderblades up. You can even lean their spearpoles forward and blur the distant ends a bit. There is a scene at the beginning of Fellowship with Elrond in the front line. Having terrain in the foreground draws the eye downward, With the shoulder view it automatically throws you out into the scene. Mid-field You can clone and replicate layers in Postwork to clump them together more. Also in post it gives you the option to remove one-two etc, edit a helmet or an arm sticking up with a sword. Make some bigger in the front, etc. A couple of fires to their sides can add some orange lightcast to a few. The midground towers are too defined, it's one of the things flattening this scene. May also try placing these towers to the left of the scene. Another trick I noticed they used in LOTR Helms Deep is the amount of spears. With so many guys clumped together, it made it seem like lots more with the massive amounts of spears. The spears don't have to be ornate. They're battle poles. Try some torches too. Background The white cloud bank cuts the scene in half, plus being bright it looks as if it's seperating the tower from the background mountains. Now your tower is not in the background anymore. If you concentrate the fogbank on the sides and not so strong, it can lead the background into the midfield. The fires are too big & defined, again they cut the scene in half, they can be smaller throwing orange ambient light. Mere suggestions of fire. The lightning from the tower draws the viewer right to it, distracting the from the rest of the scene. Some smaller less intense strikes in the clouds with ambience into the clouds a bit would work without the attention. Check out these two links. I think the golden rectangle would work well here. You don't have a single subject matter, so the focus should roll back to the perspective. Also may want to build the seperate scenes in landscape format and do your final cropping in the portrait format, it may give you more control for perspective, plus you can stack them. http://www.google.com/search?q=golden+rectangle&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official http://www.currys.com/knowledge/landscape.asp Sorry to be so long winded. ;) ICM

___
Ockham's razor- It's that simple