"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." --Ripley You might want to go for the full sized view on this one. There is a lot of subtle detailing on the ship and planet that might be missed otherwise (I'm just sayin'). Every once in a while I like to go back and revisit a subject... just to see what's changed. I've been using "Sulaco" as my desktop image at work since I created it in April of 2008, so it seemed interesting to see what an updated version might look like some 30 months later. Once again we have the free 'Sulaco' model from Vanishing Point and I've added the Dropship from the same source. I love this ship... not in the least because it was originally designed by the legendary Syd Mead. Textures on the Sulaco are a layered combination of some procedural textures I created, the texture that came with the model and one of the "Dark Knight" materials from Quadspinner. When working with layered materials like this, adjusting how the bumps are propagated up through the layers is the key to getting some nice, complex effects. There is a slider on the bump tab for whether the bumps on a layer are added to previous layers or they replace them. There is a lot of 'adding' going on here. I expanded on my original 'Sulaco' lighting rig for the ship with more spot lights and point lights, plus area lights over the airlock and for the main engine. There are now about 40 lights on the ship in total. The planet started out as Quadspinner's 'Distant Frontier' but, of course, I played around with the atmosphere, material and terrain generation functions until I got something I liked a bit better than the defaults. The camera was set way back, with a long zoom on the ship. This served to make the background larger vs. the size of the ship and gives the planet a more 'looming' quality. Unfortunately it also 'flattens' out the ship a little bit.. but I'm hoping that the lighting helps to preserve a sense of scale. Lighting is Vue's Global Radiosity (which means that all of the light reflecting around in the scene was modeled at render time) and I used "Final" render settings with some enhanced Anti-Alias quality to reduce the 'jaggies' a bit. I rendered two versions of the image at 1920x720 pixels - one with all the lights (which took about 10 hours) and one with just the sunlight (which took about 5 hours). Both renders were saved as 16-bit .tif files so that I could work with the exposure in post. Postwork in Adobe Photoshop. I composited the two renders together, reducing the opacity on the pass with the ship lighting to pull that back a bit. I adjusted exposure and contrast. Then I added the background and framing elements, copyright text, title etc. The 'Sulaco' text on the side of the ship, which was present in reference images but not in the render, was created by adding a text layer in a font that looked close to the reference images. I rasterized the text and then did a perspective adjustment on it to match the panel lines on that area of the ship. The layer of text was set to 'multiply' mode, then I reduced the opacity until it looked like paint. Finally I 'enhanced' some of the lens flares on a few of the lights with some airbrush work in Photoshop. I had a lot of fun creating and tweaking this image in my spare time over the last week or so, and enjoy comparing it to the previous image to see how my style and technique have changed in two years. As always I appreciate your comments and critique. Constructive criticism is always welcome and for anyone who'd care to give a few words on the differences, similarities, likes or dislikes between "Over LV-426" and "Sulaco" - your opinions would be most welcome! Thanks for stopping by.