Golden eagle is by Lyne with a pose from the Daz3d eagle. Cows are by Lyne and are morphs from Debbie's calf. No post processing except adding my sig.

Link to Debbie and Lyne

Very peaceful, I can almost hear the crickets in the background. Sharen

Like the way the shade falls on the cows under the tree, feels like summer.

Very nice, Carol, very serene.

Looks very nice. Only the farther cows seems a little too big ?

Thank you folks. Gebe, the farther cows are only a tiny bit smaller because they are not very far away. The cows are all together in a group. They are all this side of the fir tree on the right, which is not affected by mist. The trees on the left are much further away, and the mist is colouring them a little. The poplars are even further away. The ground slopes up a little to where the left cows are, but it is not very far.

The only thing I would suggest is that the ground looks a little too unnatural. It looks too flat. I'd recommend using a terrain for the foreground and midground and have it fade into the plane for the background.

This is a terrain in the foreground, which slopes up from the river, and there is a dip over to the right behind the reeds. It is like that all the way, but I agree that once it gets beyond the cows it looks too flat. I tried raising it more in the background, and I tried another terrain between this one and the mountain ones. But whatever I did it always looked like small hills in front of the mountains, and not a gradual slope up to them. I can never seem to get my mountains to slope down gradually. They always look like the Eiger - virtually straight up out of the meadows. I have tried painting them, generating them, generating terrains in Terragen and using those, and mountains which look very natural in Terragen straightaway look like these ones in Vue.

If anyone knows what the trick is, I should be very grateful to know what it is, because in every image with mountains I end up opting for the flat meadow because the gradual slope never looks like a gradual slope, but a bunch of unnatural hills just in front of the mountain.

It looks very spring-like and peaceful, Carol! Beautiful scene! For the terrains, I have the same problems getting them to look like I'd like them to be. I usually end up manipulating their dimensions in the viewports, reducing the Y height and enlarging the X and Z. Sometimes it works, sometimes I start all over. grin

I don't know my way around Vue that well yet, but maybe there's some sort of fractal (like rolling hills in Bryce) that will add some variation.

I know what you mean, Varian. I pull them to every shape known to geometry and it still looks weird. Sometimes I give up and stick a wall or a forest in between so the mountains peep over the top and look OK.

Christoph, I will get Bryce out and see what happens in that. It might give me a clue to what I need to do in Vue. I have not touched Bryce since I got Vue, so I have just about forgotten how it works. I shall have to dig out the handbook.

If you left-click the terrain icon in Vue, you'll get a fractal-generated terrain. I admit I haven't used that option as much as playing with the editor, so that's a good idea. I'll try those more often. :)

Varian, I usually start off like that. All these in this pic were fractal generated ones. They look as though they slope down nicely in the terrain editor, but when you stick them in the image they are too steep again. I might try the gradient fill in PSP, or maybe the feature in Corel Draw that lets you make a gradient between two shapes of differing colours and shades. Can't remember what it is called now, but I use it when making the 3d shapes for the magic eye 3d images. That gives you quite a lot of control over gradients.

You could render some black and white difference clouds in Photoshop, and then draw a 75% opaque gradient over top. This would give you a gradually sloping terrain with some hilly variations.

Carol, have you tried using different functions for the filter altitudes and edge/slope setting thingie? Darn, I can't remember now exactly what the slope thingie is called. But there's a bunch of settings on it...gotta help with the profile of the edges. Sorry I can't get to my program right now to check what it's called. :)