10 hours to render on 4 cores.
Quality 0.8
The rock displacement is an image map heightfield I drew up in photoshop. I then added additional displacements as fake stones. Then I "surfaced" it using image maps for color variation only (and to speed up the rendertimes somewhat). I think this could have been done just as well with power fractals and some more work.
The background was created using 2 cloud layers. The first was a high cloud layer to simulate marine layer stratus. I wanted the sun coming down and illuminating the rock, so I created a hole in the clouds for this to happen. I originally wanted to use an inverse distance shader to create the hole, but this didn't work, and I can only chalk it up to a bug, as it works otherwise on surfaces. I ended up having to use a custom image map, negated to create a hole.
I also wanted rainy/misty fog with visible layers and depth to add to the "ominous" feel. This was the second cloud layer, which was filtered out using a distance shader. This worked out well.
The water is a standard TG2 water plane, with the wave scale jacked up a bit. For the foam, I used 2 power fractals merged using the "difference" parameter, which gave a really nice looking foam look. To make it constrain around the rock, I had to use a custom image map based off of the original displacement image map. This is the only way I've been able to do it so far. Additionally, with so much wave activity hitting the rocks, I attempted to show this as water flowing down the rocks as the waves pulled back, but the effect didn't fully come out.
The birds were originally added as billboard images, but as such, didn't look right in the lighting (too dark). So I placed them in in photoshop.
The image itself was color/contrast corrected, with some mild sharpening. All in all, not much post processing, which is what I love about TG2. The images come out looking pretty sweet already.
Cons:
I really don't like some of the rock displacements.
Water should be more up on the rocks and washing down them, as well as splashes in the air - something to try on a new image.
I wanted more sun rays breaking through with slightly darker clouds and background. But I'll take this for now.
Many thanks for looking...
