Welcome. Thanks for taking the time to have a look at 'the Shattered World.' Once again, big image with lots of subtleties, so you might want to click to the full sized view. This is the third in a series of spacescape images done in DAZ Studio, with large quantities of painting in Photoshop to finish things out. I've started posting them to mixed media at this point as the background is extensively painted and much of the rest of the image has been heavily re-worked in post as well. The ships are skynet3020's Alliance Frigates, available here at Renderosity. I worked the materials a bit and the engine lens flares were done with Knoll Light Factory. Some motion blur was added in post as well. The shattered world itself was created in Vue by applying some displacement fractals to a sphere and then baking the geometry, then exporting to obj. In Studio I created some additional spheres to serve as the lava areas inside the cracks and an atmospheric cloud layer above. The lava areas were done with pwEffect, I also used an area light material to create some additional lighting. The atmosphere was created using a cloud map and some translucency on the material to do the clouds. The bluish atmospheric rim was painted in Photoshop. The many layers of the planet were rendered in separate passes; diffuse, specular, ambient, area light and composited and blended in Photoshop. The nebula started as a POV nebula render, as has been done in many of my previous pieces. You can find the galaxy include file here: http://www.reocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/galaxy.html I took that and did a lot of painting, some color shifting, more painting and a lot of work with the smudge/smear brush to get the final effect. Ron Deviney's Fog and Cloud brushes were instrumental in painting the nebula smoke and detailing the nebula itself. Thanks again for looking. As always constructive critique is most welcome but any comments you'd care to post are always appreciated. Best wishes, --michael