Winter Beacon

[fleetwood]

This was supposed to be a rock experiment. Back light is too bright for moonlight but what the hey.

winter guy from xoio

[Dune]

This is really great. The lighting especially. I'd have another look at the rocks; some are sitting on others. With a bit more work this can be a stunner.

[Kadri]

Very nice image.

[Tangled-Universe]

Wow, this must have taken quite a bit of time to render this noise-free?
Very nice work, great rays and 'daring' to put the majority of the scene into shadows. I wish more people would try this.

[mhaze]

Brilliant sky and an all round nice image.

[inkydigit]

great start... keep on!
this has lots of potential for sure!

J

[TheBadger]

pretty awesome already! Keep on it. You could take this to perfection! And it would even be worth that kind of trouble which is the really nice part.

[bobbystahr]

Brilliant rocks and a fine use of the hole in the clouds technique, makes a great planetary scale spot light and likely easier on resources than scaling up an actual spotlight. I agree with Dune on rock distribution, have you used a Merge shader in the rocks Distribution?

[bla bla 2]

Ho, Pretty.  I like good.

[fleetwood]

Thanks for all the encouraging comments 
With only one imported object in the frame it only took about 6 hours to render at Detail 1  AA 8  Atmosphere samples 128.
The stone layers (4 of them)  use 3 merge highest shaders in a tree setup (4 become 2 and then those 2 become 1) to avoid overlap but something is "going on". Will have to try to see why and get a better look.
 

[archonforest]

yeah the overall mood and light is great!!

[DannyG]

Nice mood

[WAS]

Great use of the object. Also that is a really nice cloud setup. Love it.

[inkydigit]

detail 1?
that seems extreme?!

[AP]

Like a scene out of a film. Certainly keep at it with this.