"Thanks guys", he said humbly. Well, the people who commissioned this rather liked it as well. It will be featured in a book about Archeology, hence the large pixelwidth. It 'only' took about 14 hours though. But after a night's rendering, I did cut it off to save and rendered the rest separately, put it together in PS. Just in case we had an electricity breakdown (it happened before). I wouldn't know if TG saves the rendered bits progressively, so it could be restored from the temporary files after pc shutdown and restart. Does anybody know? Would be handy, I guess.
Anyway, there's a lot of image mapping indeed, no painted shader. Six or so image maps, and the rampart is a large, more detailed image map, put exactly at the right spot and with a small size, if I explain understandibly. With 5 meters displacement upwards. I even made another image map to try and make the wouden fence on top of the rampart. Just a thin 2 pixel line, with 2 meters vertical displacement. But that came out a bit rough, so I painted it over in PS. And the shadows missed here and there.
The trees I made in XFrog. And Sjefen, the trees in the water are supposed to be there; there's some flooded wood at the riverbanks. The sand, Martin, is quite right (so I heard) because the IJssel pushed its way through an ancient Rhine riverbed, which deposited a lot of sand. It's really a sandy riverbed.
The people are just a few pixels, so no need to make them in Poser.
The boats I did in XFrog. Just some leaves in the right shape, and some other forms. The only problem with close-ups is that the water tends to get into the boat, when it's low in the water. The soft atmo was done with two layers of clouds, one very low, and some trial and error to get it right. Same with the 'shadow' clouds.
Here's some more details.
---Dune