Thank you all for your comments, here is the scoop on how I put this together...

The clouds were done using the new volumetic clouds in C5. I did crank up the flat bottom setting and the accuracy settings and I significantly darkened the texture. There are only 2 different cloud master objects in the scene, I just copied and rotated them to make them look different. The rest of the sky is a simple realistic sky with the sun low on the left side horizon.

The lightening was built using a few simple spline objects that were pieced together. The lightening texture was very simple, consisting of a color (mostly white) placed in both the color and glow channels. I used Anything Glows as a controllable light source for the main pieces of the lightening. I also turned on the aura effect, thus the aura graininess problem.

I did augment the water reflection using 2 spot lights, each placed at the lightening location about 3/4 of the way up and pointed at a spot in the water in line with the camera. I added a sunlight with a setting of about 60 or 65. These were the only lights used in the scene (ambient light set very low, maybe 3 or 4).

The water itself is actually a terrain built using the fractal noise feature (I find the ridged noise option works well for simulating water). I used very small feature size and height settings.

Yes Hoofdcommissaris, there is foam on the water, simulated foam anyway. The water texture (with foam) is done entirely with a procedural texture that I built some time ago and have been using in different projects.

To get the lightening to not look like simple dashed lines in the final render, I rendered at 1280x1024 with the object accuracy set to 1/2 pixal.

Message edited on: 03/15/2006 14:30