Hi and thanks for looking in. You might want to have a click through to full size on this one to appreciate the detail. "Ducks in Flight" is posted as a work in progress. This is a blowup rendered from another image I'm working on. Yes, it's where the 'Shattered Temple' is ending up as well. This is a Vue8i render - I selected a small area of the image I'm working on and rendered this section out at 944x1200 pixels using the 'render blowup' feature. I don't think the ducks are going to make it to the final version, my ornithology consultant (i.e. theShore) doesn't feel that they fit the milieux and I'm not especially happy with the pose or the materials. Nonetheless I felt they were interesting enough to warrant a little excursion of their own. This piece is really a test of the layered ecosystem material I'm using on the hillside. I've learned a lot lately about developing complex layered ecosystems that seem to be doing a nice job of rendering sophisticated foliage environments. Tutorials at geekatplay.com were invaluable in this - especially #63 "Tips to creating realistic ecosystem" which had the information I needed to figure out how to apply subtle color differences on a plant by plant basis. I also used "Getting more realistic distributions in Vue ecosystems" from www.virtual-lands-3d.com for a nice approach on using multi-layered ecosystems with layer affinity to produce realistic clumping effects. So - what you're seeing here on the hillside is a material that begins with a rock texture. Over that is a plain grass material layer. I used the environment tab to adjust the slope and altitude where the grass will be present over the rock. This is important for easily establishing a baseline of foliage vs rock without messing with the ecosystems. Next I started creating ecosystems using the layering/clumping technique from the virtual lands tutorial. First came the trees, with three layers of trees (broadleaf straight trunks and rural maples to make a generic deciduous forest) each scaled down a bit from previous with the layer affinity appropriately set. The smallest layer also includes some bushes. These tree layers top out about midway up the hill so that the top of the hill (that part where the temple will be) is entirely given over to grassland and stone. You can just see a little fo this in the top right corner of the image. Above that is a low density layer with some random stones in it - you can see a few of these fieldstones in the final render. Above that is a layer with bushes and long grasses which is slightly repelled from the field stones and the final layer is grass clumps and long grasses with no layer attraction and a very high density. All of these vegetation layers use the slope and altitude constraints established with the initial grass layer baseline, with the trees giving way to the grasses about midway up the hill. All of the plants use a color mixing node that links to the 'position from object center' node as outlined in the Geekatplay tutorial. This gives each plant in the ecosystem a subtle color variation from the plant next to it. I actually saved this out as a meta node to facilitate easier re-use as I added layers. All of the ecosystems are dynamically populated to save system resources by not populating areas that don't need it. Lighting is high quality global illumination and the atmosphere and lighting quality settings are at +4. I also set a 2 degree shadow softness on the sunlight and increased shadow softness quality to +4. Looks great, murder on render time. The image was rendered at 'final' quality setting in about 22 hours. GR lighting with soft shadows and volumetric sunlight on all those little plants is a killer. Postwork was limited to some levels and hue/saturation adjustments. As always I appreciate the comments and critiques I will try to answer some of the questions asked by folks about 'Shattered Temple' when I post the final image, because I am out of space here.