Hi and thanks for clicking in. "Shattered Temple" is basically a materials study for a larger piece. I was really trying to get the weathered stone looking right and found I had something that looked pretty cool so I finished it. The structure is "Temple Ruins" from DAZ. I saved it out of DAZ Studio as an obj file and loaded it into Thomas Luft's free Ivy Generator software. I made several Ivy props for the temple and loaded those back into DAZ Studio, then exported the whole thing as an obj file for import into Vue8i. I did the initial work in Studio because the obj import and export scales and positions correctly so long as you keep the same settings in import and export.. so I had the temple with Ivy objects all set to import into Vue cleanly. In Vue I set up the Ivy leaf and stem materials, making sure to apply backlighting to the leaf material. Then I moved on to the stone. The stone is entirely procedural and composed of several layers. There is a base material with a complex fractal bump composed of a fine noise function for the bumps and a larger fractal pattern for the chipped areas. Over that is a darker mossy material which is just applied to the undersides of objects.. you cannot really see that here due to the POV angle, but it's there. Over that is a similar dark material with a custom alpha function to make the streaks. Over that is a lichen material that tends to favor flat surfaces. Finally the entire structure is covered with an ecosystem of little pebbles that are applied to horizontal surfaces. Whew - complex indeed. I threw in a couple of Vue grasses just for variety and assigned a green grass material to the ground plane (off camera) just to get the reflected light looking good. I spent a lot of time twidling with the atmosphere trying to produce some cool looking godrays, but I couldn't get anything I liked so I dumped the idea and went with a standard atmosphere that would show off my materials well. Lighting is global radiosity and the image was rendered with the atmospheric and lighing quality settings maxxed out. Render time was around three hours, wiht the majority of that being the global radiosity pre-pass. Postwork consisted of some levels adjustment and hue & saturation tweaking in photoshop. Thanks as always for your comments and critique.... I was really pleased at the reactions to "Life Will Find A Way."