I've got a couple of things left to do yet, but I thought I'd run it past you guys to see if anything jumps out as just not right...

The tiered pools jump right out, can you break them into different groups and change the mats so they are easier to distinguish? The lighting looks uneven also, make your hot spot farther to the right, maybe? Just an opinion....

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I think you have chose a very challenging subject to do...

Right now, the image looks like an abstracted representation, if that is what you are after, then would recommend mainly using more lights - instead of lighting the scene in a more or less global fashion, you could array extra lights close to the tiers to bring them more to one's attention.

If you are after a more or less "realistic" presentation, then the tiers being hard edged stands out, in comparison to the bank on the left. Don't know your preferred methods, but might experiment using latices as terrains, overlaping them into the already present terrains to break up the edges... texturing them to match what you use.

Haven't ever been to the locale, so don't know what the texture is like, but at present it looks in the image like a very hard, and smooth stone.

One idea, is to use lights, as mentioned above, but not just with the default white color, but adding some variety, going towards the orange/yellow end to warm up the texures and towards the bluer end of the spectrum to cool down that area.

Depends on the direction you wish to go. Abstract or photoreal.

Just some ideas.
best, hewsan

well.....I don't see any mammoths..............

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Thanks, all! You hit on the areas I'm concerned about --but like a lot of people, I was starting to wonder if I'm not overworking it.

There are a lot of different areas informally called 'Mammoth Hot Springs': I think if you're tryiny to represent the area above Huntington Lake,in the Sierra Nevada, the valley is much deeper, there's an old tressle style bridge and a little restaraunt in the area. I remember how steep that one is as I took Lenore there once on an old Pan Head with only a rear break, a little daunting, and I also remember the bridge - Two rows of planks about 12" across (a good thing that I have a good sense of balance.) This looks a little like the Hot Creek area by the Airport near Mammoth Lakes on the East Side of the Sierra Nevada, although there too the canyon is a little deeper, Its a river bed cut into yellowish sandstones and some of the pools are so hot now, that there is steam coming out of them and they are so hot they've been fenced off. I wonder if Sherriff's "Officer Opie" still comes down ther to arrest the skinny dippers? BTW: Hot Creek was featured on "California's Gold" once; if you're interested in that and you're lucky you might catch a rerun or check with pbs.org - they might have some reference picts for you. I've never been to the area actually called "Mammoth Hot Springs" but I would assume that there is visable steam there too. Also the sun's position can dramatically change how the water texture looks. you might play around with that some. - TJ

err: brake not break