"It's not the end of the world... but I think you can see it from there." 'Desolation' - 'The End' - are we detecting a theme here? Good. No worries... most of my problems have been creative and upon completing this piece I'm feeling much better. This is the first personal piece in month or so that has felt worthy of completion and I'm feeling like the artistic block might be clearing. Of course, tomorrow I'll probably feel differently, but for today, we feel good! The landscape in 'The End' was created using the same techniques outlined in 'Desolation' with a terraced fractal landscape created in Vue and then exported to World Machine 2 for extensive procedural erosion, then re-imported into Vue for rendering. In creating the terrain, I went with a terraced landscape with a 45 degree tilt to the terracing filter. I was looking for a "Vasquez Rocks" type of landscape, so I went very heavy with the erosion in World Machine. After I brought the landscape back into Vue I explored the terrain with the camera until I found a vista that gave me some nice compositional lines. In this case, the way the landscape forms a rounded curve from right to left, punctuated by the jagged peaks, caught my eye. Next I turned my attention to the atmosphere. The landscape seemed to lend itself well to contrast and I decided to place the sun in shot and create some serious godrays, turning the piece into a study in contrast. That's when things went from being a 'lost world' type of render to something more apocalyptic. I thickened the atmosphere (atmospheric perspective to 4, lots of fog and haze) and added some of Dick Scherzinger's fine procedural clouds from the "Cloudscapes" collection. This gave me some tremendous godrays when I turned on the volumetric sunlight. I was careful to manage the atmosphere's 'decay' settings to keep things from getting too red. Once I had an atmosphere I was happy with I saved it and went to a simple and quick daylight atmosphere for work on texturing the landscape. I used mixed materials, some from Vue and some from the Quadspinner "Mineral Infinity" collection to texture the rocks nicely. Unfortunately you lose a lot of these details in the final render. I decided the image needed a foreground, mostly to get that tree in on the left to balance out the rocks.. so I added a standard terrain, sculpted it and positioned it in front of the camera. It's covered with an ecosystem of dry weeds and small stones. I added the three hero rocks from the "Sculpted Rocks" collection and worked the textures with some additional displacement and layers of lichen and stains, then topped them with an ecosystem of moss and grass. The tree got a re-texturing as well, with a new bark material and some additional moss. Then I brought back my original dark atmosphere and proceeded to do dozens of low quality test renders to try to get the light balance right. I used global radiosity lighting and played around a lot with the sunlight vs. ambient slider until I got things about right. Then I decided the scene needed a lake just to add that final touch... which meant re-balancing the light again. Final render in Vue 8.5i was around 14 hours at 1920x720, 'final' quality settings. When the render was complete I saved out two versions.. an 8-bit .bmp with the exposure adjusted to 'blow out' the sunlight and a 16-bit .tif with no exposure adjustments. I brought these into photoshop and applied the 'blown' layer over the unadjusted layer in 'hard light' mode. This gave me a nice dynamic contrast between the light and dark areas of the image. I did some more hue and contrast adjustments over the image until I got something I was happy with. This may look very dark to some folks but it looks nice on my hw calibrated LCD monitor. Many thanks to everyone who offered comments and encouragement on 'Desolation.' As always your comments and constructive criticism are most appreciated!