I've wanted to do an image like this for a while. Though its not to the quality I knew I could achieve if I worked on it even more, I figured it was finished enough to post.
The road is a quick 15 minute image map I created in Photoshop and applied as a tiled image scaled appropriately.
The background mountain was a quick image map blur created in photoshop (about 1 minute) and imported as a terrain into TG2 as a heightfield. I did this so I wouldn't have to cycle through different seeds until I got the shape and location I wanted.
The rocks and terrain detail are all power fractals, masked through a custom image map I based off the road image (else I'd get rock displacements in the road itself).
The clouds are basic power fractals, but I had to add a mask to open a hole for the sun (else the clouds blocked it 99% of the time). This mask only took a few seconds in photoshop, since I used it as camera projection. I could have done a much better job, but figured I was on a roll and kept going.
The lighting is the new GI technique I've been dialing in, and I really love how it moods up each image I've used it on.
Stats:
render time: 7 hours over 4 cores
resolution: 800x600
quality: 1.0
GI: 2/2
AA: 3
Minor color correction/levels/sharpening in photoshop.
As stated, its not really complete (and could have had much better detail), but I want to move onto another project.
Many thanks for viewing... I hope you enjoy it.
-Jeff