Tropical Canyons (Sunny)

Here is my first tropical canyons picture. I have another two more waiting to be uploaded, one of which is still rendering. I have been working on this image (and the 4 or so variations of it) for several hours now.

It all started out as a moonscape sorta. It was still gonna stay that way even after a threw the river in, but after screwing around with the terrain some and the comera angle a lot I couldn't get back into that "perfect spot" again. The fact that I was swinging the sun all around the heavens definitally didn't help me any

Anyways, I then proceded to try and find a different place to place the camera. Since near the middle of the river I had place a small island in the middle I figured that would make an interesting vantage point. Well actually, it wasn't really an island at first. It was originally part of a cliff until I went in and carved a rounded line right through it, dividing the two pieces. This makes for an interesting O shape in that section of the river.

After screwing around for a bit with different settings, I finally started to see what I wanted to do. One thing that I've been doing is saving images every so often so that I can see how the image changed during the project. The first one I made was very nice, but I had reverted back to an old save state because I had messed around with the terrain.

On the side of the "island" though, there had been these two shadows that I really liked, but when I had reloaded the terrain file of course those changes had been lost. It took me awhile to see what was casting the shadows in the first image, but I finally found it.

I had created a small spire (would that be the right word?) right near the island that blended quite well with the cliff right behind it. That is what had been casting the shadows. When I recreated it, I got the same effect, although the shadows had put on a little bit of weight while they were gone. Oh well, it was close enough.

I then went in and added some surf effects to the water, making it look like there is this nice little beach just below the cliff edge that the camera is (floating?) on. I then decided that the water had to have some waves in it because it just seemed to calm to have a surf going on.

After that I just created one that was hazy, along with one that has the sun on the other side of the planet or sky or whatever and is about to or three times larger than before. It's also around 350% brighter, although the hazyness cuts that down a lot

My Lava Reef pic is this same file except that I raised the "water" level several hundred meters. Oh, and of course I used the lava plug-in. Anyways, this description will be for all three, or possibly four pics I upload with the words Tropical Canyons in them.

Speaking of which, I almost forgot. The reason I called them the Tropical Canyons is because I used the tropical waters color presets for the water. If you look along the bottom right where the surf is you will see some cyan water and if you look at the side of the island that you can see the most of you'll be able to still see some of it underwater. I think it gives it a really nice effect.

Well, thanks for taking the time to look at my pictures, and if you read through this description, thanks for that too