Now that the finalists are posted it should be OK to show my image off here. My contribution was not really designed specifically for the environment competition, but rather is part of a big project of mine. A bit of background: I wanted to set up a large set for a new series of SciFi inspired images and animations. I wanted enough detail for close-up use, but also a vast landscape for overview shots. The planet of New Tarakina IV is a fairly young world with approximately 1.5 times the earth's diameter (18,500km) and a somewhat higher gravity (1.2G). The atmosphere is much denser than that of Earth and contains large amounts of nitrogen, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and water vapor. There is very little oxygen. The planet is just a short time (geologically) out of its volcanic phase and still somewhat active. The land surface is dominated by small and large volcanic peaks and deposits of ash/hardened lava. Life has started to take hold. On land various plants and mushrooms are the dominant forms. Animals are restricted to insect-like forms on land and a diverse sea-life. Anyway, that was the goal when I started this project about three month ago. I modeled the basic surface using procedurals in Vue so that I can produce larger terrains if needed. For the main set I used a 5km*5km chunk of terrain that was exported in 4k*4k points to world machine for the addition of erosion and then back into Vue. Materials were applied using both maps exported from WM and environmental controls. Same for the ecosystems (all dynamic). The image shown here is a view of one of the lava deposit valleys with a human exploration team. One curiosity are the large crystal boulders that are found in these areas (those turn out to be very interesting for human explorers because of their mineral content). Set up and rendered in Vue 9.5 Infinite. Ciao TD