Hi, thanks for stopping in. It seems that the short break from other matters which enabled this brief burst of creativity in Vue is coming to an end. I hope you've enjoyed the ride as much as I have. I've certianly learned a lot and made some neat images. Hopefully, I'll have time in the short term for some personal work, but not at anywhere near the pace of the last two weeks. I'll leave you with a project that's been bubbling on the back burner for some time... "The Dragon in the Courtyard." This image really _wants_ global radiosity lighting and I think, thanks to the Quadspinner tutorials, that I finally have the chops to pull it off. Production credits: Mil Dragon 2 with default textures (those so called 'bump maps' are really showing their age!), Matt and Vicky 3 (reduced resolution) with clothing, and Trinity Atrium all from DAZ. Boy's hair is Rievel Hair and woman's is Osean Hair, both by AprilYSH - available at DAZ. All of the Ivy was created with Thomas Luft's Ivy Generator - an awesome little piece of freeware. The scene was composed in DAZ Studio - I even created a little cube where I put the camera, for reference. The scene was exported as seperate .obj objects for the boy, the woman, the dragon, the atrium and each of the ivy plants. I then imported these items into Vue, except the Dragon, who has some additional work done on his wing drape in Modo prior to being brought into Vue. Materials on all of the objects were adjusted in Vue, with appropriate backlighting properties applied to the dragon wing and crest membranes and ivy leaves. The project sat at this point for the better part of a year because I could not get the lighting to work for me. Following my recent efforts with the Quadspinner "Capturing the Brilliance Light" tutorial I felt confident enough to resume the project. Rendering: Lighting is full on Global Radiosity with the slider at 96% sunlight vs ambient and 100% from the sky. I kicked up the Global Radiosity gain +1 and the Skydome Lighting gain +4. The sky and atmosphere quality settings were +4 and the scene rendered at 1238x1600 with broadcast quality settings. Render time was 19 hours with some quick stop and saves for resume render capability during thunder storms. I saved the image as a 16bit tif file so that I could have some exposure and gamma latitude in Photoshop. Postwork: I increased the gamma and exposure a bit to lighten the shadows. Next I spent some time with the cloning tool fixing a nasty problem with Mil Dragon 2 where the horn meets (or rather fails to meet) the head. I added two additional layers and painted in some smoke using Ron's Smoke 2 brushes - 1 layer for the right nostril, with some erasing for the snout coverage, and one layer for the left. I blurred both smoke layers a bit and added some noise. A little hue and saturation adjustment to color match the white smoke into the scene a bit better and then I dropped th opacity until I was confortable with the effect. Next, I added a medium gray layer, filled that with monochome noise and applied that in soft light mode. I dropped the opacity to around 5%. This served to blend the postwork into the scene a bit more. Finally, I added borders and titles for the completed image. As always, my thanks to all who have commented on my work. Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are MOST welcome!