The submarine from Prowling The Deep from a different angle, with lights - yes, lights. It's a future submarine, how do you know they aren't some super duper ray thingie that helps with sub hunting?? Rendered in Vue because, well, it just r0x! OK, honestly - the lights? Vue is hands down perfect for playing with lights, far far far superior to Poser's lights system. Whilst lighting a scene can make or break it, positioning of lights themselves inside the scene for visual effect can add that extra touch of life and realism a flat model alone won't convey as well. So whenever I'm playing with a scene that has objects that could have lights is in it, I try to figure out where they might logically be, and play around to see if adding them enhances the overall image. The Daz submarine had obvious places for lighting effects - the impeller tunnels either side of the hull. I'm not exactly happy with the light on the starboard tunnel as it stands, but I couldn't find a balance of settings and lighting that gave me the effect I was looking for, a diffuse glow within the tunnel that filled it up, without it washing out the view. The light on the sail was an experiment because there's a blob in that location, and it felt perfect for a spot light effect, so I added a point light on the blob (to simulate the light source itself), and a spot light angled down and out with volumetric effects turned on, in a narrow beam width, to simulate the searchlight (or, for purists, the un-specified super duper ray beam thingie :)) I finished it off by setting the camera blur to 2% to create the depth of field effect and the focus to just at the back of the sail so the background would look "generically amorphous". Caustics were applied to the sunlight and the spot light. The render was done using my own custom render settings, with "compute physically accurate caustics" toggled on, rendered out to 1600x1000 in widescreen. Took the image into Photoshop for postwork, which was minor, then reduced the image size to 800x500 before tweaking it for framing, titling, and my banner at the bottom. One last touch up to add my signature in Picasa and convert the master .psd file into a .jpg for uploading, and voila! Total time from start to finish on this was about an hour and a half, since the model and terrain were already setup from Prowling The Deep.