This was from when I had first seen dinosaurs (Before our adventure in "Say Hello..." and "Buddies =) !" where we had next encountered dinosaurs on another island). It was a very sunny morning. Miho was already outside working on her BUG and the CTV (Cross-terrain Vehicle). Both of which she had built. From the time I woke up, I was cooked up in a sound proof room totally engrossed in the videos Miho had taken of the dinosaurs before. I still had not gotten a chance to see them with my own eyes having landed only yesterday night. This island was simply known as DI0001, short for Dinosaur Island 1. The first island where dinosaurs were discovered by Miho and still alive and Miho had setup a small research base there... She had not told anyone about the island's existing other than me and that too only the day before. Suddenly the walkie-talkie crackled and Miho's excited voice came through - "Get out here quickly, you wanna see this"... and there were very loud roars in the background. I got out of my chair and ran. With the sound proof room and me being glued to the monitor I had no inkling of what was happening outside. As I came out I saw Miho coming towards me smiling and pointing towards a wall. At first I thought I was seeing things because there seems to be 2 dinosaurs where there should be a solid perimeter wall. Then I released the wall was transparent. Something I had not noticed when I landed here during the night. What an amazing sight it was.. well.... both... Miho ;) as well as the 2 dinosaurs... I was awestruck. Miho told me to get on the walkway around the top of the wall to get a closer look and also said that she would take me for a ride in the BUG later to see the different dinosaurs... I quickly ran back in to get my camera and ran out again to climb the stairs to the walkway to start taking pictures... The day was turning out to be pretty amazing indeed ! Miho later told me the wall was made of a very special material. Stronger than anything else but was transparent and she used this material so that she had a 360 view of the outside world from within the research base. There were no flying dinosaurs here so they were safe with a open top and in any case the base had a array of non-lethal weapons installed around the perimeter that would pop out from the floor to knock out any creature that did manage to come in in less than a millisecond. And at time I did not know Miho could talk to the animals or how strong she really was and well she was actually not in any danger from any of the dinosaurs. The protection was for anyone else she brought here. The base was self sustaining. The shiny floors were actually power generating light absorption panels, it turned any light to energy - sunlight, starlight, moonlight and well there was plenty of that in this pristine island. And the panels themselves were self cleaning. And there was another innovation she was testing here, called liquid electricity. Basically it was a gel like substance that could store electricity and give power to the CTV and BUG to travel for hours on end. One of those cans contained enough liquid electricity to give a range of 2000km. She had moved out of fossil fuel use some time back. Once her research was done, the whole base would be dismantled and moved without leaving a single trace that it was ever here. I was looking forward to spending a few days here exploring this island with Miho

This is an update of my earlier render. The original one I had done more than 2 years ago. If you compare the two the first thing that is apparent is how Miho looks and how much brighter the scene is now. In this update I moved Miho more to the front and center of the scene. Again, I worked on all the textures. For the BUG (Colo @ Daz) and the CTV (FAV @ Daz) I had to control the highlights on the paint material because the scene is so bight. Also on the BUG I used the same technique I used to re-texture the shuttlestar and got the original markings back. It the earlier version the paint material had removed all the markings. I also changed the perimeter wall texture to a specular material from a semi transparent glossy material. I used a lower IOR so that it did not create too much refraction. You can still see the effect of refraction on it specially on the dinosaur on the right and also on the ground outside. Through it looks like the ground has a flat top, if you look at the reflection (that does not have the refraction effect) it shows how the actual ground has uneven top. I also used a secular material on the BUG cockpit glass. That allows you to see the details within the cockpit clearly and it still has reflections on it. Previously it was a glossy material with partial transparency set. A glossy surface with transparency does not look as good as a specular material for glass or liquid. Also in the earlier render the ground was just a chrome material. In this the chrome material is mixed the original texture to give details to the floor that makes it look like a glass is covering the floor. Last material to change was the tires on the CTV. It was too shiny and gloss in the previous render. I made it more matte to show the details. Having so many shiny surfaces was a serious pain. Plus this scene is covered with specular materials from all sides (the perimeter wall). Light through specular materials creates extreme noise unless GL Clamp is set to a very low value like 10. Which I avoid doing so at all cost because it makes the Miho's skin material look flat. Luckily with a lot of tweaking and also a new 'adaptive noise sampling' option in Octane, I got a fairly clean render. The only thing I don't like is the some of the highlights on the chrome on the BUG. I used a very large sun to produce a softer shadows and well the sun shows up in all the shiny surfaces as a big white blob. Btw. there is a tweaked skin material on Miho. My latest version of her skin materials. Though this is not a render where I can showcase it. I will do a another render to showcase that. To see details in this render you need to view the full image.

As mentioned before I have removed the older original render. I am trying to redo all the renders to bring consistency to my gallery with the current and final version of Miho