I was trying to get the effect of a sandstorm starting, so you could still see things and the sun was still visible. Once it was well under way it would be just a sand coloured fog. I did this by messing with some of the volumetric materials, like vertical swirls, altering their functions and colours, and applying them to a series of cylinders, a bit like you do rain.

It took 2 and a half hours to render - one of the longest I have had for a 640x480 in Vue 4.

BTW, does anyone know how to get the sun/moon to be round in Vue. In my renders they are always a bit elliptical.

That storm looks convincing! Good work! :)

The sun is eliptical, because: it is not in the center of the image and you're using Vue's original camera setting to focal 35. This is a relatively wide angle. If you have a real photo cam you know that this focal deforms every thing what is close to the borders. Use a camera angle at focal 45/50 wich corresponds to the human eye. You also can try with a focal 80/100 or more, but then you will loose lots of deepth. Your image looks nice but very flat. You can get better sandstorm effects with spheres mapped with cloud material which you tint in sand color and make it more or less transparent. :-)Guitta

Wow, this looks great...Sharen

To be sure about what I was saying, I've just done a fast try. No volumetric material used (because the crazy render time you indicated:-(). I used a second shadowless directional light in front of the object to show more details of the camel. My image is not better then yours, just different. Hope this helps to improve your image:-) Guitta

Thanks, Guitta. I have made some changes following your suggestions, and I have a rounder sun, and more sand about but still more detail in the camels than I had before, and it rendered it a much more normal time.

For my Crossing the Wastelands pic I used several streched spheres (have to check, but I think only 3) with sandy looking cloud materials, plus a cylinder similarly mapped. The spheres provided the overall "storm" effect, then I made a very short (and very small!) animation of the cylinder passing across the frame through the main character. This allowed me to find a frame that added a good "impact" appearance.

I rendered using depth of field to blur the background into the storm which gave a better feeling that the sand was moving. I used no volumetric materials at all (which do look nice but good grief are they slow!) and while I don't recall the actual render time, I believe it was a little over an hour for a 1280x960 render using broadcast quality. Reducing that pic to 1024x768 further softened and slightly blurred the look, improving the effect IMHO.