Dance of the Giants

Following my last big submission (Golden symphony) i've bucked up my ideas a bit. Whilst a lot of people marvelled, many who are aware of my abilties pretty much knew i could do better... and yeah i agree with them - whilst the piece was a success in deviantart terms, by me, it wasn't anywhere near my usual standards. Bad terrain, light conflictions, i could have done better. So here's my effort.

First, a better terrain, better texturising and surfacing, i've got Alyn-esque clouds and lighting as usual to maintain a degree of drama, the only thing i wish would look better was the water, but i couldn't get it looking great with that amount of sunlight, so i guess it's kinda fitting in that sense. Second problem was my lighting, i figured that if i centralised the upper light source (the nebula) - then i wouldn't have a problem, as everything that reflects the light would point inwards. My initial intention was to have 1 giant nebula in the middle, but after several hours later it turned into 2 nebulas entwining themselves round each other, almost dancing. Hence the title of the piece. Then it was a case of adding to this. I think i may have gone a bit overboard with the stars, but they're not nearly as bad as some previous works in fairness. The transition in this piece was majorly difficult since the clouds were present, but i just added some gradual stars and a glow from the clouds upwards... check full view else it won't be apparant.

So yeah, that's the lil image runthrough.

Stats? I was warned in a previous image that i should be careful what i say here, however i've never been known to be careful with the truth, so here are the stats.

Terragen preprocessing - 3hours
Render time - 2hours
Post render time = 1hour
Render size originally = 8000*6000
Space Time = 11hours (since the last piece i've learnt some nice new tricks that helped reduce the time, especially for the nebula.
Total time = 17hours (over 3 days)
Tools Used = Terragen, Wacom tablet, Photoshop6
Photoshop layers = 186 (some layers merged)
.PSD size = 203mb

So yeahyeah blahblah get on with it alyn...

Comments and especially fav's appreciated! and don't forget to FULL VIEW since you will NOT be able to appreciate the image without it (trust me on this one).

This is my last submission this year, going out with a bang i guess