'All the "great secrets" under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering. He was altogehter wreched. He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he hated everything and the Ring most of all.' --Fellowship of the Ring p.54 I've been in a "Lord of the Rings" state of mind lately. LOTR is my happy place I go to when I'm stressed and life has been a bit stressful of late. Now about halfway through Return of the King.... This is obviously influenced by the Peter Jackson's film version, I had "Gollum's Song" from the Two Towers soundtrack running through my head as I was putting it together. This started as a long shot of Gollum fretting over the Precious in his dark cave under the mountain, but it really started to come together when I switched to a closeup. Production Credits: DAZ Studio Render - about 6 hours to render, mostly due to high quality pwSurface settings and raytraced shawows from the point and area lights. Postwork in Photoshop CS3. Michael 4 from DAZ with the morphs++ pack. This was all accomplished via dial spins, I used a picture of Weta's Gollum from the cover of Cinefex issue 92 for reference and worked at him for an hour or two to see how close I could get. Texture is Mariah's "Uncle Albert" from DAZ and hair is "Mutant Hair" also from DAZ. The eye textures are taken from deepblue's "Eye Maps: Generation 4" from DAZ (schleras) and DM's Nanette (irises and pupils) available here. pwSurface2 shader was used on everything you see. The cave was done in Bryce some time ago I used rock textures that I picked up with a Vue tutorial sometime back. The One Ring was made and UV mapped in Modo, the inscription texture was created in photoshop using Johan Winge's Tengwar Annatar font, which is also used for the decorative veriabage on the borders of the image. I know Gollum fretting over the Ring with the 'fiery letters' visible is not strictly true to the story, I'm exercising some artistic license.... In other words, it looked cool so I went with it. Lighting: The lighting in this image is also an artistic conceit. I dropped a pointlight in the center of the Ring and turned off 'cast shadows' on the Ring. There is a spot light for rim lighting and another pointed at the cave wall, plus an area light to provide some bounce light. Really, if I were lighting this accurately, there wouldn't be anything for you to see, now would there? It gets a might dark under them Misty Mountains.... Postwork: I rendered a Mood Master pass, just to get some atmosphere in, it's applied in screen mode very fainty. I also did a levels adjustment and added the decorative borders, title and copyright. Thanks as always for your comments and critique. I appreciate any advice on how to do things better or even your pointing out what _could_ be done better. My apologies to all of my friends here for not commenting more, things have been so very hectic on this end of late. Hopefully back to a saner schedule soon... theSea