Looks like the Mother of all Sandstorms is coming.....

I thought of trying to add rain and lightning, but that probably falls under the category of too much information and meager as it is this scene took over 28 hours to render as it is. BTW, the clouds over the volcano is actually a spotlight using "Clay's Fire". the greek ship, I'm gonna have to look up where I got that. the rest I either imported from RDS 5.5, poser 4.03 or made in Bryce 3.1.

28Hours!!!!!! Wow! How do you get such long rendertimes for this image, it looks relatively simple to render to me. Did you use the premiumrender with a high rpp setting?

I checked every "premium" box I could find. The volumetric world and spotlights took up alot of the render time, I'd imagine. Remember I'm still using Bryce 3.1 so that probably accounts for some of the time. As I get better I'll add more stuff, but for now something told me to keep it simple - didn't wanna hurt your eyes too bad. The vision of the skeleton waiting for a compiler to finish compiling an executable comes to mind.

Boy do you ever have patience! I would go nuts with a 28 hour render! LynnDee

I've had images rendering for days, but they look far more complex than this. I usually just use Normal-AA and no Premium settings, but I do often use thousands of objects, to create special effects or just to build a detailed object.

That lttle trimerene(sp) I think has over 100 objects. you only see a corner of the temple but each column has a number of cylinder objects. even the trident has 9-10 objects, haze and fog, two volumetric lights the - one on the right was responsable for alot of the cpu time. so it's probably a little more complex than it needed to be for the level of detail that is percieved by the viewer. I thought the use of a light as a cloud texture was kind of a neat idea, and that's why I had patience with it and left it in. I probably try to use it again sometime when I've got it under better control, and play with the other lighting technique somemore at a later date. (I wish I could have removed the dark downward turning arc near the column, which was an effect of the volumetric light on the right and left the sun at 50% rather than turning it down to 40% or so but time would not permit another long render.) - I'm still learning so any comments or criticism are very welcome. Thanks, bikermouse

'a light as a cloud texture' you mean the light has a texture? that explains the long rendertime.

Yes, Poseidon points to "clays fire" as used as a light texture. The top of the pyrimid denotes the xyz source of the yellow volumetric light with a faint cloud texture. the sun is enabled with blend haze and fog. volumetric world enabled in fine art mode, spacial optimation set to max,antialias set to max.