-Collab- The Abiding Darkness

The Abiding Darkness / The Blessed Light
A Collaboration between =the-disposessed and =Sweetheart-Hikari.

To everything in the world there are two sides - good and evil, yin and yang, light and darkness. Without these forces in balance there would be nothing - no shadows without sunlight, no beauty without ugliness. These two facets stretch beyond us into the infinite cosmos, and yet they are both within us all.

We each produced a Terragen render on one of these themes, and then swapped pieces and added the space elements to the other scene. So each piece was half Ben and half Rachel.

The Abiding Darkness
So after I sent off my peaceful render to Rachel, I received in return this grim, desolate landscape. I'm getting pretty happy with my nebula work, which is lucky because her render looked really great so I didn't want to disappoint. I tried to make it turbulent and fiery (hence the colours.. obviously ) and i also made it a different colour to the actual scene itself to give it some variety, to break up the lighting on the planet a bit, and because it made it more clear that the nebula is the most distant object. The planet was initially going to be gaseous, but I decided a rocky planet with volcanic activity better suited the theme.

Incidentally, my half of the Terragen render (which is the bottom of her image) took a ridiculous 31 hours to render. I've never, ever seen Terragen take so long.. previously in my experience a 1600x1200 image takes around 7-9 hours if it has a reasonable amount of water.. I guess this is what I get for adjusting virtually every setting and rendering a huge amount of water from a great height above the surface.

In this piece I used around 30 layers. This taught me a lesson, which is that you name the layers when you MAKE them, not when you need to tell them apart. That delayed me somewhat. I'm sure everyone who was talking to me on MSN at the time remembers my good-natured cursing . It wasnt much of a problem. I couldn't give an estimate of the time taken as I've been working on it intermittently for weeks.

I think I've said enough. Besides, these words are besides the point. Just enjoy the image.

I HAVE TO INSIST THAT YOU FULLVIEW.
Really. Or you aren't seeing it properly.

Please COMMENT. If you like it, please +FAV. Rachel and I really appreciate your support. And whatever you do, remember to go to visit The Blessed Light on Rachel's page and do the same. They are a pair.