Hi - thanks for looking in. Many thanks to everyone who commented on "the Stone Bridge." "The Dawn of Time" is intended as a more artistic piece than the previous image.... so I did try to practice my compositional skills a bit more and make something with some proportion and balance. The idea here was to depict a landscape as it would have been before life came along... hence the title. Some liberties were taken from a scientific standpoint: before life there would have been no oxygen in the atmosphere so the sky may have looked rather different from the one we are used to.... no attempt was made to depict that. Rendered in Vue8.5i. Render time was around 30 hours.. over the course of several nights. Thank goodness for "resume render." We have here two procedural terrains, with some weathering using the 'strata' filter. Materials are mostly Quadspinner from the "Mineral Infinity" collection and three layers of rock ecosystems. Clouds are from Dick Scherzinger's "Meta Clouds Vol 1" Pack. I'm still having a lot of trouble getting my water to render properly. I'm getting nasty black pixels here and there. I tried cranking up the anti-aliasing settings, setting AA mode to 'soft' and upping the internal reflections values. This has minimized the problem but it's still happening (as you can see if you look closely at the full sized image). Any advice would be MOST welcome! Long render time on this image was mostly due to the aforementioned Anti-Alias settings, but also the metaclouds in the scene, which can take a while but are well worth the wait. Postwork in Photoshop included adjusting the exposure, adding some artificial bloom and a little bit of noise to smooth things over. Regarding the noise: I usually add a layer of medium gray (RGB 128 128 128) and then run the noise filter on it - gaussian, monochromatic, say 2% to 10%. I apply this layer in 'overlay' mode and reduce the opacity until it is barely noticeable. I find this gives the image a more naturalistic feeling and helps smooth any noise that is present in the original render. In this case, since I went with the 'soft' anti-alias mode it actually helps to 'roughen' that up a bit. At least, to my eye. As always your constructive comments and critique are most welcome.