Hello! "Probe" is what you could call a speed render. I worked pretty fast and tried not to spend too much time getting bogged down in details as I was trying to execute a concept from an overall feeling and not make a piece that was 100% perfect in all respects. I was inspired while watching the Family Guy parody of "The Empire Strikes Back" ('Something Something Something Darkside' - funny as all get out!) to try an image like one of the Hoth establishing shots in ESB. Here is the result. The probe ship was modeled in Modo in about 45 mins with no texturing and minimal UV maps. I exported it as an obj file and imported it into Vue. In Vue I added a material from Monsoons 'Outer Rim' collection to the body of the probe and generic materials for the dark surfaces and the engine port. I added a bluish point light with some lens flare for the engine.. then some tweaking of the scale of the materials and it looked good. Next I created an infinite procedural landscape and added a confined strata filter. I adjusted the terrain fractal values and the strata values... I'm pretty familiar with how these function now so it didn't take long to get a glacial terrain that looked something like the ESB plates. I applied the material I've used in my 'Peaks' images to the terrain to make it into a rocky snowfield. Next I put the camera and the probe onto their own layer and moved that layer around until I found an interesting corner of the landscape to place them over... notice the rugged area in the lower part of the image, the smooth terrain in the middle and the rugged area again towards the top. The atmosphere started as the 'Above the Clouds' atmosphere that comes with Vue. I took the existing clouds out and added some high clouds from one of the AsileFX cloud collections. I then changed the lighting to Global Radiosity, tweaked the sun position and upped the sun softness to 2 degrees. I spent another hour or so messing with the atmosphere settings and didn't find anything that I liked better than what I had when I started out; so I reverted to the saved scene. I rendered this out at 1920 x 720 pixels with lighting quality at 2 and atmospheric quality at 4. Then I went to bed... shouldn't start these things at 9pm :D Render time was about 10 hours. Postwork was limited to some levels adjustments and color tweaking... addition of title and background in Photoshop. Really, the most time I spent was in fruitless tweaking of the atmosphere... I honestly should have left well enough alone. With that time included there's about 4 hours of actual work in this image from start of modeling the probe to saving out the jpg to post on Renderosity. Sometimes it's fun to see what you can do with a strong inspiration and a sure hand. I'll be interested to see what folks think of this image and, as always, constructive critique and suggestions for improvement are most welcome. Thanks for looking in!