I started this image with the rockface. First I loaded a .ter file and added some horizontally and some vertically stretched PF for displacement. Somewhere in the forum I found a trick by Matt to create those steep rock walls with nice vertical displacement and that's tilting the surface to the camera's direction by a twist and shear shader. As long as you don't see the rest of the terrain it works perfectly.
Then I wanted to have this blocky, cubic, rectangular rock structure a lot of people were talking about here recently. I tried to implement some of the files that some of the members shared, but it didn't look the way I wanted. So I chose the easy (lazy?) way: I used an image map shader with a nice photographed rock structure, which first didn't work either, because no matter what I did (or forgot to do?) the image map was distorted or warped by the terrain. I'm sure there's a solution for this, probably placing a compute terrain or normal somewhere but I didn't want to waiste too much time, so I simply used camera projection.
This may be quite obvious most of the time, so I duplicated the render camera, which is slightly pointing upwards, lifted it up a few meters and tilted the copied projection cam slightly downwards, so that it projected the image perpendicularly onto the rock surface.
I then broke up this image map shader by a power fractal. The green, mossy stuff is procedural.
Zoulik shrub by Aymenk2003 (search for "Zoulik" in the file sharing section).
The dragon model is from this site:
http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/alduin-dragon-rigged--76875.htmlI loaded it into Max, detached the eyes, the inner mouth, the tongue and each single tooth, mapped and textured these and attached them back to the body. Then I posed the head, the tail and the legs just by bending some vertices using soft selection, refined the body diffuse texture map and added a complete new bump map.
The translucency of the wings is faked by adding a (Photoshop-painted) mask for luminosity.
And last but not least: the poor guy is Xoio's Arnaud.
Originally rendered in 4000 X 2250 px (Detail 0.8, AA 9 - about 8h rendertime). Resized to Full HD, slightly increased contrast and saturation, added a bit of chromatic aberration and sharpened just a little bit.