Try playing with the highlight settings on the water material. Did you know the highlight can go beyond 100%? Set it to 250% or higher for a sunset and you will see what I mean.

Thanks! I did that image at the absolute last minute and was lucky to get it done on time.

I'll try to do some screen prints of my settings when I get home. Going out of town for the weekend. Benettor has the right idea. Ggrace's pic looks pretty close. I used a bunch of copies of the first terrain to get the water going back into the distance. I also put a water plane underneath. The two pics I did both used volumetric atmospheres and it seemed to show the reflections on the water better. Yes you start with a glacier terrain because that gives you a nice flat terrain. Then you hit the function tab in the upper right corner. You have to edit the function which takes some getting used to, but the chipped function is what scoops out the nice valleys to make the top of your glacier wavy. I had tried smooth noise and fractal before but never got anything that looked like waves. Good luck!

#3

Glad some people are interested in this! Ok, I've tried making clouds with imported objects or boolean objects or terrains and it won't work. It seems the only thing the volumetric materials work on are Vue primitives. You can, however, overlap your spheres to make denser clouds. Just make a copy of one sphere and offset it a little. If you overlap them exactly you will get a lot of noise.

You have to go to "display material summary" It is a button on the top bar. The icon looks like some spheres. It will show all the materials in your scene. When you alter them, it will alter all your trees at once.

Thanks for the advice. I think the problem, however, is not the cable modem. I had auto-update turned off on the little preview window, so when I needed a preview, I would just click on it. This is when Vue would go into slow mode, and stay there, as if it was constantly rendering. I've been playing with it and it seems that if I just leave auto-preview on, everything is nice and smooth. Hope it stays that way!

I vote for #2. The lighting is just superb.

Crank that instant draw up all the way. I've had the same issue, and that seems to take care of it. I usually work in wireframe mode though. I like it better than the opengl preview.

That is one big terrain except for the very distant hills in the back. It's in a volumetric atmosphere so I made it really large to get a nice haze effect. I don't think I had to resize the trees.