looks good IMVHO the stone ends are blurred would use box mapping on them and add bump map made from a greyscale noise field

The bump will help with the stretchies, but wouldn't a cylindrical or spherical map work better than box-mapping? Worth experimenting with! I presume that when done there will be some carvings, too? (wishful grin) I like this. The floor could be better: perhaps smoother and more down-trodden down the center line (thousands of years of passing feet). Do the real cairns have smoke-blackened roofs? Carolly

I think this is a very real-looking cairn. The shapes of the stones are wonderful. I agree with Carolly about the floor...it should perhaps be smoother. You have such a knack for capturing early Celtic stoneworks. Maybe you have an Orcadian beehive-shaped house in your future? (hint, hint) By the way, I adore your henge, and am just waiting to get more RAM into my sickly system before I do some renderings with it!! Kimberly

Miss Nancy, I agree about the mapping, I did use box mapping in Max but it disappeared when saved as 3DS. I have bump maps for the rocks but they tend to obscure the shapes when in shadow. Carolly, can you imagine how many maps I'd need to put carvings on them all? :-)Use the one for the altar stone, the designs on there are pretty accurate. The floor needs work, it is supposed to be gravelly. A worn floor is possible but would need a full sized map and larger files again. Perhaps the lack of wear and smoke blackening is because the cairn has only just been built! Kimberly, an Orcadian house is probably very far in my future :-) I still don't know what I'm doing in Max half the time. Sorry the henge is so large but I had to choose between accuracy and megabytes>

Looking cool .. I didn't download the henge because I keep forgetting at work and it would kill my system at home but this looks great

Sure, those are already large downloads. I have to wait on the other textures since the bandwidth was exceeded almost immediately. Hmm... if we want footprints we can make a transmap overlay for each foot and drop a few prints artistically down the middle. Same for smoke smears and smudges. Sprinkling a couple of tiny maps will be better on the render times than more huge ones. There is a chamber (Maes Howe?) visited by vikings a thousand years ago. They apparently had to wait out a storm and carved graffiti all over the walls. For some reason, I've never been able to get a full translation. It is one of the places I'll have to visit (shucky darns) if I want accuracy. :) Thank you so much for these! Carolly

Been fooling around and have managed to produce a worn path up the middle of the entrance. I can sort out the blur by moving the stones so that none of the ends are visible. This may take a while because I've started dreaming of armies of stones marching across the landscape crushing all before them.....Arghhhhhh. Chris

Chris, Oh, gods and fishes, the dreams! Yup. When things break into pixels, I know I've been at the computer too long. Usually the stones dance, because we see the single rings. But, is it Carnac? Thousands of stones marching in determined formation and you wonder what Earth Master commanded them so long ago, and whether he still cares? Carolly