A wonderful composition full of harmony and beauty. Fantastic work. Superbly done!!Congratulations!!

Oh, VERY lovely Jim. I love this more than the first version I think. The composition is excellent and the color/light balance. Klasse.

Wonderful scene! Bravo!

Thanks to you both. BTW, the major changes from the last version: Theme: Added "couples" 2nd swan pair, flying bird pair, male human figure to join female human figure. This, plus the flowers on the island and climbing roses on the building change the theme from something like "pretty swans and building" to something like "love in the summer". Terrains: New, improved terrains, including separating island terrain from mid terrain (same poplar tree terrain behind that and same mountain terrain in far distance). *Lighting & Atmosphere: Improved aerial perspective and haze to give depth and separate the foreground and background. Bottom line: I think most scenes that show promise will benefit from doing them over and over and over, until you have truly reached your limits.

This is lovely Jim! Well done!

Ah...I loved the first one but yes...this one is even better! You must send me a message and tell me how long it took to render, please? I am still working on understanding vue 6...and this water especially looks lovely!! :) Very nice (and better) composition in this version!

The render took 14 hours and 35 minutes on a single 2.5 year old PC with Intel D915GAG motherboard Intel P-4 at 3.0 GHz and 2GB memory, running Windows XP-Pro SP-2. After canceling a 48 Hr. render (which i'm sure would have ended up well over 50 hrs.), i reset everything to minimums to get the final render. That is, i set Global spectral Sky, Fog & Haze quality boost back to zero from +1 (and got no cloud grain! Hooray e-on!), set GI lighting skydome quality boost back to zero from +1, turned off render texture AA, set render Object AA to only 6/18 at 75% and turned off all super-sampling. No "Optimize" anything and Advanced effects quality slider to only 25%. Render was to screen at 1024x768. I expect most of the render time was on the water reflections. I like the water too. The main thing that improved the water was getting the right material scale. I used large X & Y (to get waves farther apart) and tiny Z - to keep the waves small and "gentle" vertically. Of course the "angle at which water turns reflective" is also critical. Also made the water much more murky to hide the swan's feet.

This looks beautiful. The only thing I would change, if it was my image, would be to decrease the ambient light on the clouds, to give it more "volume". Well, I would also put the flying birds elsewhere because, where they are, I immediately imagined that that cloud was a face and the two birds were its eyes. I normally try to avoid these kind of coincidences, but that's me. Well, I also would change the decay of the fog and/or haze, so that the house is also with a bit of it. Right now, it's too sharp (as sharp as the swans), which doesnt give a feeling of distance. But this is a very good image!

Thanks Rutra. Crits much appreciated here - all to rare in the art fora! I know that when I do extensive critiques the artists often thank me by PM or email - so I hope people will do more and see the value. Of course we are all busy these days and it does take extra time & effort. I agree with all your comments - didn't notice the bird position thing at all. Struggled quite a lot with getting the haze/fog right (did at least a dozen changes and test renders)and thought that the building had enough already - guess not.

I like this one! EXT!