Happy New Year, everyone! Thought I'd start 2014 with some vibrant, using lots of new toys I got over the holiday season. I especially wanted to send out well wishes to Jakiblue, who constantly encourages me, and makes me work harder to try to improve myself. She's also the person who gifted me the morphing rocks in this image. Specifically, they are the Morphing Rocks and Formations by EmmaAndJordi (Rendo). They were the element I built the rest of the scene around. Very cool and very versatile. Due to the tremendous sales throughout the month of December, I spent way more than I should have, so I figured I had best use some of the darn things! The armor is the Akuma Hanta Fantasy Outfit V4 by RPublishing, Orion1167 and xv3D (Rendo). It does have the high-heeled boots that so annoy me in fantasy outfits, but I cannot fault the quality of the product. It posed beautifully and rendered in DS quite well without any tweaking. The hammer the character is wielding came from FoRender. They have some of the coolest looking weapons around. The Toyman made the magic FX. I have several of his sets, but I believe these "spells" came from his Spell Master 3 magical special effects (Rendo). The monster is the Hunter Fiend by Sixus1 (Rendo). Once I set the displacement to 200% and the variance to -1/1, he really popped. This is the second time I've used him and he's jumped into my top five for go-to monsters. Let's see, what else - ah, hair. The hair on the warrior is Fire Goddess Hair by Valea (Rendo). Great for action scenes. The mage is adorned with Love Romance Hair by OOT and Bice (Rendo). It has a long braid, but I hid it as I couldn't get it to sway without distorting. The texture is something I put together, so don't blame the vendors for that. I didn't have a white texture for the hair, so I made one myself. The gown the mage is wearing is the Lamore Gown by Nikisatez (Rendo). It works wonderfully. I had no trouble adjusting it to fit the character, and it posed easily, without distorting. Very pleased. The texture is by motif, one of my favorite clothing texture artists. Unfortunately for me, he mostly does textures for "real world" clothing, and doesn't work on fantasy clothing as much as he used to. The character I used for the dark elf is MDD Ahruna for V4.2 by Maddelerium (Rendo). She's an absolutely gorgeous character. If you haven't looked her over, do so. The dark skin version I used is a bonus, while the main character has a pale skin version and a creepy version. Lots of make up styles, eye colors and even several eyebrow colors (something I especially appreciate). I made absolutely no adjustments to her and thought she rendered very well in DS. The warrior character was made with Godin's VH Fenna (Rendo). She has a nice morph that didn't get scary strange when I applied a fairly extreme expression to her. Again, I had no trouble with the surface settings in DS. Once again, I used SunLIGHT DS by VinceBagna (RDNA) to light the scene. I went with the 9 a.m. option. I did change the lighting color to a bluish color, but aside from that I made no changes to it. The background is by Rajraja and is from their Distant Realm-2 set (Rendo). The rocks included in the background went very well with the morphing rocks I used in the render. Oh, and I mustn't forget the Gargoyle Hound from DAZ. He's showing his age a bit, but I still like him.