Fix&Rotate

Oh yes, there is the rope that is "escheresque" and the ladder to the scaffold also looks a bit strange - both on the right side of the picture.

lighting I really like that you are using a real photographer's lighting tricks. The 3 point lighting set-up is classic. The difference between bryce and the real world is that in the real world light bounces within a room and in bryce it does not. To me each light must serve a purpose as you say, but what purpose? Personally, I just feel that the white light is not helping and will not help in most circumstances because white light does not occur in nature very often. Even a camera flash when you consider it carefully is not actually white, but slightly purple, a bit of blue and red. A bright purple light will look "white" if it is bright enough. Same with the sun, a bright yellow ball that gives so much yellow light it looks "white at first glance. I really love those houses in the background also.

Thanks for good words. Well, background hills are made using David's patent, It seems to be forgotten - so here's the algorithm: Make terrain, apply Mediterranean Hills material from preset, copy this terrain, lower a bit, add spikes in Terrain Editor, apply "Foliage2" material from preset, add transparency to this material to get the "trees" kinda blurred - that's all. About the lighting - I've put my hands on a photography handbook with a "lighting" chapter - all the photographers' theories about lighting the scene work also in our 3D world (at least for me)..;) So my lights are quite specialised: every light has its own task: In this image sun gives shadows and lights whole scene, it's white with some addiction of yellow - minimal because my "fill" light is yellow - this one is placed behind, right and above the camera - it fills the the shadows with warm yellow light and "warms up" the right side of every object in the scene, giving them "3D feel" Yellow "fill" light always acts opposite to "contour" - Blue light is placed at left and vis-a-vis the camera, and it's lighting towards it (cannot be seen - it's beyond FOV) results of this light cannot be seen clearly in this image (some blue hightlights at the golden monument) but it gets very important in dark scenes.. (night, dungeon etc..) These two lights cannot be white they must be in (more or less) opposite colours. Finally there goes "flash" - this one is white, placed behind the camera shines in the same direction. contrary to the previous two its quite strong but has very limited range - only closest objects get the light - that gives some depth to the scene, fills the closest shadows (but it also flattens the 3D effect caused by coloured pair) - this is the theory behind my light setting. Well, as you have found "the wicked Pillars", I have to say that there's another M.C.Escher detail.. can you find it? ;)

Greetings from Maurits Cornelis Escher. Beautifully made! Very detailed. Background mountains look very realistic. Great job. 5/5 from me.

. What really takes me is the detail. A lot of work here, even little things as the men on the side of the building and the bump map infront. nice job!

The wooded hills in the background look excellent. The illusion is very clever too, and I admitt I didn't pick up on it at once, but as it was pointed out to me in your description, "Ah!" it all made sense. I'm not sure I agree with all the colour choices you made or the inclusion of the highly reflective figure on the horse, however, that is not to say I don't appreciate how much effort went into crafting this image. The lighting setup seems to be contradictory in parts, but I guess that is going to happen in such a confusing image. Worth a five for the illusion alone.

cool It's been a while. Good to see from you again. I like the lighting as is and thanks for the set-up description. The only thing I would consider would be the white light. One of the best things about ibl is that white light almost never happens, and it looks alot more realistic because of it. I wonder what the scene would look like if that white light from the sun and the spot was tinted and less "perfect."This scene would respond well I believe to the beach probe .hdri. There's no transparency so the render should be very fast. Since they have no faces the story must be told with the body language of these characters. The state of mind of each character seems clear to me, great job. Nice background also. I would suggest lightening the sky color a bit. The sky can get dark in these low haze situations, making the sky look false. Raising the sky color lightness a bit will give the "illusion" that there is more haze in the background than there really is. The sky will then look like it has more depth.