Hello - thanks for clicking in. Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. There has been a lot of commissioned work lately (which is good) and not much time for personal projects (which is bad). Still, I had a nice gap over the weekend and managed to play a gig and get this piece going. Strange alien spaceships, abandoned on faraway planets are a staple of sci-fi art and I wanted to try my hand at this. "The Wreck" was initially inspired by some of the matte paintings in 'Alien' but once I started modeling the ship in Modo things just sort of went in a direction on their own. The spaceship started as a long capsule primitive which was bent into a torq shape. Then I did a lot of bevel and extrude operations. I went for a certain degree of alien-ness by trying to avoid most symmetry, except some radial. I did not UV map at all, figuring I'd use procedural materials in Vue and only applied a separate material to some of the indentations which show as the darker areas on the finished piece. I exported the ship from Modo as an .obj and imported into Vue. In the Vue scene the ship is scaled to a size of 2km or so across and 500m tall. I created a procedural terrain about 5km on a side using the terrain fractal and strata filter and then set the ship on a relatively flat spot. I created the foreground procedural terrain the same way, it's about 100m square and then I added some of Chipp Walter's free Meta-peeps for scale - you can see the little guys with the yellow and green coats standing on the ridge. Finally there are a couple of procedural terrains in the background for mountains. All of the terrain elements use materials from Quadspinner's "Mineral Infinity" collection combined with a sand layer on the flat areas. The material on the spaceship is a complex multi-layer material. The base is 'gray stone' with some cracks added to the bump map. Over this is a varnish layer for reflectivity. Over that is a layer of grunge that clings to the undersides of the structure, then a drip layer on the sides and another grunge layer on the horizontal area of the structure. Finally there is a sand layer on the flattest areas of the structure. This material was duplicated on the darker material zones, with a dark gray color layer added into the mix to darken it. The moons are standard Vue planet objects with custom textures created in Photoshop. The textures are a pastiche of Celestia texture maps of the Moon, Europa and Callisto which were chopped to 1024x1024 and then rounded off with the 'sphereize' filter. Final rendering at 1920x720 took about six hours with global radiosity and volumetric sunlight.. quality settings at 2 for the lighting and 3 for the atmosphere. There was little postwork beyond adjusting the exposure of the 16bit .tif file I saved out. As always thanks for your comments and any constructive critique you may choose to offer. I hope you enjoy "the Wreck."