The siege

[Hannes]

Nine single images. The castle is made with DAZ's castle creator. Trees by Lightning (of course!). The knights are a population of a group of low poly characters (nothing for closeups). The siegetowers are from turbosquid (free download).
I used a cloudlayer for the smoke and four pointlights for the fires.

Total rendertime: about 150 hours (my longest render so far).

[rcallicotte]

Well...I'd prefer a link.  My imagination isn't quite doing it as well as I hoped.   

[edit - it finally came through...see below]

[nvseal]

Nice job. The population looks really good. A different and impressive render.

[rcallicotte]

Where's the link?   

[edit - oh.  It just showed up...NO.  I take that back.  There's a problem with the link or image icon showing up here.]

Okay.  It finally showed up.  WOW!!  This is, like nvseal said, different and it's well done.  I can almost see the flames dancing.  Further critiques, depending on what you're going to do with this, include a little more randomization with the flames of fire (both in size and placement) and maybe some sort of action coming from the castle (like a catapulted fire ball or a bomb like in LOTR.

Great job.  I like this a lot.

[cyphyr]

Outstanding  9 images tells me your using the free version, yes? Please invest if only so we can see this in its full glory.
Richard

[inkydigit]

agree with cyphyr!..awesome!

[buzzzzz1]

Very nice creation, although 150 hours (6 days) for a 1280x666 rendered in 9 crops is .................well, to me is totally unacceptable. Of course, who cares what I think? LOL 

Besides, as long as you get your kicks, I guess that's whats important.  Twice this size would be nice so we could see the detail and quality and you could actually print it if you chose to.

[Hannes]

Thank you all!
Well, the size of the original stitched image is 2076X1075. The quality isn't enough for a print, but you can see a little bit more details. Here it is:

The render times are that high because I used the other lightsources and raytraced shadows in the cloud settings.
Here is a daytime render I did as a test before. It didn't render very long:


I hate those render times as well, but I had this idea, so I just did it.

[old_blaggard]

This is great work!  I love your implementation, and your attention to detail definitely helps bring this image above and beyond the average.  My only complaints are with the rather bland texturing in the background, but other than that, this is definitely one of the most complete, original, and well-executed Terragen scenes I have seen in quite a long time.

[buzzzzz1]

Ah! Much better showing the full size image.  Thanks for posting it!   The only thing that would keep me from printing would be the noise in the upper area of fire light.  You put much thought into this and it shows. Congrats!

[matrix2003]

Wow!  This is quite the piece of work.  Bravo!

[dandelO]

Absolutely great! I love how the fireglow traces rays through the smoke layer. How many different soldier models are populated to make the battle? That's some close-up hand to hand! Reminds me of 'The First Law' trilogy of books by Joe Abercrombie.
Great image, my favourite recent TG image, hands down.

[moodflow]

Very very impressive! The populations are spectacular!   

[rcallicotte]

Wow, this is great!  Thanks for showing the daytime scene - this was astounding.

[Hannes]

Thanks again!!
There are lots of instances of a single group of ten characters to avoid a crowd of ten thousand identical people. So for this image I had two tree populations and one population of the knights (or whatever they are).