Journey's End Geek Sheet

The self-imposed challenge in this image was drawing each element to the correct scale relative to everything else. There is no illusion of distance or closeness through scaling objects up or down. The Rook in the foreground touches almost off the camera and has a wing span of about a foot and a half. The castle is a little under 50' tall, built on the top of an 800ft cliff.

It may appear that there are two additional light sources in the scene. This is not true. I handled the lighting the same way Nature herself does it. There is only the sun, and the rest is done with cloud positioning, with the clouds set to cast shadows. I also concealed the fact that the horizon falls off the top edge of the picture with some low clouds. This gives the whole scene more depth.

The whole castle, including the walls, is a terrain with Boolean holes punched out for the windows and the door (which is not visible in the picture). The windows and door are fairly detailled, in case I decide to render a closer view some time in the future

The vegetation around the castle is made with my tree construction kit. You can download it from the Objects Database at the Bryce Forum. It contains four different jagged rocks in DXF format to use as foliage, 3 textured terrains for trunks and four different foliage materials, for all seasons. Thanks to Calyxa for the idea. This scene contains over 50 assorted trees, bushes and vines, yet, the total size of the scene file is only 10.8Mb.

Last but not least, the foamy shoreline. There seem to be many different ways to create this effect. Mine goes like this:
Duplicate the terrain which is to have foamy waves lapping up on the shore around it, scale the duplicate down drastically along the y axis using the edit palette, enlarge it along the z and x axes in the object attributes dialogue, aply a water texture to it, pump the texture frequency up to something like five or ten times of what you would normally use for a water surface, set the transparency to about 30 perecent, reflection to 0 and refraction to 100. The effect of reflection and refraction would not be noticeable and turning them off like this cuts down the render time. The ambience setting should be unnaturally high. Adjust the size of your foam object for a perfect fit, using the edit palette. Adjust the vertical position using the arrow keys and option/alt key.

To make this "Exhibition Print" I darkened the edges slightly after rendering. Would you notice if I didn't tell you?