Hello and thanks for viewing. "The Return" is the product of a three week effort to create a more complex scene in Vue. So far I've created a lot of landscapes and simpler scenes but I wanted to try my hand at something with a lot of elements. The story here can best be described as "Tolkien-esque" but is not meant to illustrate any particular event from his Middle-Earth. It sort of grew organically out of the elements I had available to work with. The dolphins were a last minute inspiration. This scene was created in the pre-release version of Vue 8.5 with additional posing done in DAZ Studio 3. Postwork in Adobe photoshop CS4. The landscape was created as a terrain fractal and exported to World Machine for erosion and then re-imported back into Vue (kindly see the descriptions of "Desolation" and "the End" for details on that process). The material on the landscape is a complex mix of layers, materials from Chipp Walters "Terragen" products and materials from Quadspinner's "Mineral Infinity." I really wanted to get some nice looking weathered cliffs. I think these work. Plant ecosystems are "crawling bushes" for the ground cover and cherry trees mostly, with color variations. There is a layer near the top with some "broad leaf straight" trunk trees and some oaks near the top of the landscape as well. Buildings are a mix of elven architecture from Cornucopia 3D, DAZ and Meshbox. The figures & costumes are from DAZ and were posed in DAZ Studio and exported .obj files then placed on the ship, which is from Cornucopia3D. Ship and figures underwent extensive surface & material tweaking. Dolphins are from DAZ and Seabirds are from Cornucopia3D. The wakes for the ship and dolphins were created in the terrain editor and sculpted using Vue 8's new sculpting features. Clouds were from Dick Scherzinger's cloudscape collection on Cornucopia3D - these work great with Vue 8.5's new cloud positioning system. I spent a lot of time with the sky getting the color I wanted, and the atmosphere was rendered with soft volumetric sunlight and global radiosity. I also had to turn the quality up to "broadcast" to get the ocean reflections to look smooth. All of which resulted in a 128 hour render time. Yup 128 hours. Thank goodness for 'resume render' both as a method for using the machine to get other things done and to periodically save my work. So that took about a week.. this was a long one to be sure. Post work was limited to some levels adjustments and adding a little noise and artificial lens glare to smooth things out a bit. I had a lot of fun making this and learned a few things about working in Vue along the way. I hope you enjoy it. Constructive critique of my work is always very much appreciated, as are all of your comments.