Thanks all! Appreciate the comments!
Aitraaz - Yep: Ye olde Photoshope....
Thanks!
andretto - Many thanks!
lsega77 - Glad you like it!
ivox3 - Thanks! (PS is my friend - hides a lot of errors.
)
glebe - I guess this means that I'm doing something right for a change...
Thanks!
jdp - You'd be surprised at how random my processes are when throwing together a scene.... Thanks!
jotero - appreciate the compliment!
sampson - Thanks!
piroshki - Thanks!
The reflection in the foreground was acutally accidential. In reality, one of my 'fog' objects near the camera intersected the water, so it's actually a refraction of that. When I first did some test renderings I couldn't figure out where in the heck it was coming from. But I ended up liking it - sorta looks like foam from a breaking wave, so I left it in.
You caught me! You are absolutely correct about the waves ending in the distance. I used the 3ds Max displacement modifier to create the waves in the foreground. As I progressed putting together the scene, I decided I needed more water in the distance so I added a simple large box with just a bump map. I didn't realize until after the render was done in the morning that I set the bump value way too low.
For the water I used a box instead of a plane in order to get more realistic refraction. There's a "ground" plane just underneath to keep the light from coming through from below.
No HDRI - Just physical sky with sun - plus my volume fog cheat.
kkm - Thanks.
iandavis - Thanks for the compliment!
No Z-depth for this one. The fog effect was created using numerous foggy glass panes with the Nd set to 1 and no reflections. In this particular scene, I used 22 fog planes, evenly spaced from the camera to the farthest figure. I just played with the roughness of the material until I acheived the density of fog I was looking for. Although I didn't use it for this one, you can use a texture map in the roughness slot in order to create a patchy fog effect as well.
All of the stuff I do is purely as a hobby in my spare time - keeps me sane (for the most part)
. Surprisingly enough (at least to me), I have actually started selling some of my pieces - mostly to folks at work. I had printed some of my images on the office color laser printer just to see how they would come out. A bunch of people saw them sitting on my desk, and all of a sudden I was getting swamped with requests. One lady from my office just bought five of my pieces.
(I think she may need to see a shrink....!).
So now, I've set up an account with Shutterfly - which is a really great print service - and have been constantly ordering prints. I even had them print out some catalogs and coffee table bound books (already sold several of those).
I work at the US Embassy in Colombia, and they are always setting up art shows for local artists. I guess word has gotten around, and now they want to do a showing of my work. Yikes!
Maybe I do have a future in this after all.....
Thanks again for all of your compliments! It's because of all of your support, inspiration, and honest criticisms that kept me at this and steered me to get to where I am now.
"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." - Tom Stoppard
My modern art gallery at:
http://nws.carbonmade.com/
Lovely! Great 'photoshope' work too. Water looks perfect, very nice figure as well 
- By Mark Bell
- By Mike Amos 20251018183343
- By Blanchett