Hi -- thanks for stopping by. As some of you may be aware, it's been a while since I've had a piece that I felt was really inspired. Well it took a major kick in the pants from my employer (think moving my job 75 miles away, thanks so very much, jerks) but I felt inspired this week. And so, we bring you "The Road to Mordor." Obviously, this was influenced by Peter Jackon's movies, more specifically the amazing concept work by John Howe and Alan Lee, but it's also a bit of my own take and not directly drawn from a moment in the movie or the book. Vue 6i render - slight level adjustment and captions in Photoshop. No other postwork. Production credits: Frodo and Sam are both DAZ's 'Matt' preschool figure, wearing the 'Villager Clothes.' Cloak is from DAZ and the figures were posed in DAZ|Studio and exported as .obj -- then brought into Vue and tweaked. Mt. Doom was imported from a digital elevation map of a mountian in Washington State - probably Rainer or Hood - I really didn't bother to check. Looked cool on the topo so I snagged it - thanks to the USGS for that one. There's a nice little tutorial on the Cornucopia site for using DEM's in Vue. Barad-Dur was modeled in Modo by yours truely - just a quick thing, but really nice to have the tools available to knock it together when needed. You can almost make out the four DAZ Wyverns circing the tower. Foreground Tree is "Leafless Tree - Old & Dead" from Cornucopia and bushes are Lisa B's "Dead Bushes" from DAZ. I also used some of Chipp Walter's TerraPak materials in here. Finally, this scene would not have looked one tenth as cool without the techniques I learned from watching tutorials over at Geek At Play Studios. If you're interested in improving your Vue skills you owe it to yourself to go watch all of those tutorials. Full Image is 1920 x 1200 and there's lots of detail so please consider a full sized view. My thanks to everyone who has viewed and commented my previous work - as always constructive critique and suggestions for improvement are encouraged, and your comments are appreciated.