Texturing and modeling time - 160 hours 6 hours to render the oak trees in the background layer. 5 hours 18 minutes to render the scene Full size - 3636 X 2657 Kyomizudera (Pure Water Temple) is built into the side of Otowayama mountain on the east side of Kyoto, Japan. The original temple dates back to 780 AD and remains associated with Nara/Hosso Buddhism, the oldest sect within Japanese Buddhism. It was built without the use of nails. The people who built Kyomizudera understood. When you walk along its wooden promenade, look out over the chasm and see the mountains and trees above and the whole city of Kyoto laid out beneath your feet, you can have only one thought: This is why we build temples. You are surrounded by a sea of wooden gates, stone guardians, lanterns, pagodas and stairs that just keep going up. Then, suddenly, Kyomizudera. A temple so large you can't even see it. Because it's built into the mountainside, supported by 139 pillars, and all you can do is stand inside and look out. This is the greatest temple in Japan. I chose one very small part of it. There are three waterfalls (Otawa-no-taki). The spring water in the temple grounds is said to have a healing effect on all those who taste it. The water on the left is the water of romance . The central water is the money water. The water on the right is the water of long life. Everyone chooses only one and drinks from it. I wanted to create a scene that was timeless and traditional, that could have taken place today, a hundred, two hundred or five hundred years ago. A place of utter peace and beauty. This is not an accurate architectural render, but an artist's version. It's very close, though. I've taken artistic liberties like curving the walls, but aside from compositional and color considerations, it's as close as I could make it. My version is darker than the real place, just because I like dark. Kyomizudera is highly commercialized these days, sadly. I suspect I'll revisit this temple. I have this thing about temples. This is the first scene I've made that involves several levels, and the first I've done where everything was UV unwrapped and all the textures created specifically for it. I also wanted to do something with water. It's rendered with Blackman antialias and exposure control and the default scanline renderer. I wanted to do Mental Ray and GI, but my computer, old and weak with not enough memory, gasped and fell over from exhaustion and not enough memory errors just trying to render with mental ray and no GI. The big stone was a challenge. I wanted to create a stone that looked like it had a Buddha painted on it following the natural contours of the stone. There is a large stone just like that at the temple. but it has no Buddha on it. The signboard on the wall is there too, and the writing on it is accurate to Kyomizudera. This is as close as I've come yet to accomplishing, artistically, what I'm trying to do with CG.