I've always been fascinated with the hyper-real look of Terragen renders. It's rare one sees the same in Vue, and I always wondered why. If you've never seen any of Luc Bianco's Terragen renderings, then you're in for a treat.

I grabbed one of his better renders, and attempted to re-create in Vue. Here's his most wonderful rendering (I've resampled it down to 800 pixels wide to fit within forum guidelines).

As you can see, it really is stunning in it's sharpness and accuracy. While not quite there yet, I have been able to duplicate a bit of the same qualities in Vue using a Standard atmosphere, and rendered out at the same original size (1024 x768) then resampled exactly the same way down to 800 pixels wide. The difference is the below rendering, while not as great as Luc's, only took 7 minutes on my 2 year old Sony laptop (Core Duo 1.8Ghz, 1GB RAM).

I've played around with the textures, and will continue this experiment to see if I can improve upon them-- especially the grass texture which is so fine in the Terragen render.

Comments welcome, Chipp