Weapon Deployed 2a

To me the main issue of this image is the haze. The haze will give you the depth and the scale required for this composition. I don't worry about the lighting, because I'm sure Rashad sent you a really nice hdr. And Spektyr, are the razor sharp edges of the bomber intentional? If not, you should add 1 or 2 more edges where you feel that the shape needs to be smoothly beveled.

That is exactly what I was thinking Horo, so I sent him my current ibl skylight solution for him to test out if he has the time. It is a gradient aligned with the sun position and provides more or less even skylight from all sides, well balanced like light from the real sky would be if it was not being blocked by clouds. there are some clouds in the sky here but the hdri I sent to him should still function perfectly.

Much improved. The terrain looks convincing as does the contrail. The bomber has a better camouflage making it also optically almost to a stealth aircraft. Lightning 2b is buggy, that's why there is a 2c. Pity 2c doesn't support all cores. The Quality setting is in fact the number of lights created by the median-cut algorithm. All lights have a common brightness. The alg divides the sphere into surfaces of equal average brightnesses and distributes the available lights into those parts. On a bright spot, the surface with a light is very small, packing a lot of lights together. Quality 16 means 16 lights in the centre of 16 surfaces. The Outside HDRI was perhaps not the best choice. You have a bright spot from the sun behind the clouds and a dark wall on the back (dynamic 5600:1). If you use an HDRI with a prominent light source - like the sun - you should turn it so that the suns match in position. If you rather go for the ambient light, you need an HDRI with less dynamic and no sun in order to have the lights distributed evenly around your scene. Remember that the light is on all 4 steradians. If you don't set the shadow intensity in the skylab to 100%, light from beneath can bleed through the ground and brighten up shadows. This is sometimes desirable and sometimes it is not. Here, I suspect that it would.

Also, when you import an hdri Bryce automatically turns off haze. This scene needs a little haze to indicate scale so be mindful of that annoying trait of Bryce.

Yes, much improved. The light cradles the missile just enough to make it look real. I think the benefits of IBL far outweigh the drawbacks. I sent you a little e-mail on the skylight subject and a sample hdri I am testing to see if it serves this outdoor purpose better than the outdoor.hdri you have used here. For me shadows are still too deep along the mountains. This could be due to any number of things but it strikes me that the skylight is not generating enough light. from that side. Clearly adding ambient glow in the materials lab would be taking a step backward as would using the awful skydome. At this point I think the answer is modifying the hdri you are using. If indeed the source hdri used above doesn't have a dark spot in that area, then maybe there are not enough light samples to fully express the hdri. So it is possible that this could be a quality issue. But I think it is more a limitation of that particular hdri.

Thanks Guys!! Connor, Yes, the air intakes were there in the first one but they were obscured by shadow. The original version off the B24 had exteral turbine engines but I realised that would put too much drag on it so I used the internal engine design I created for the B25 Stiletto. Now this one looks like it will slice through the air like a razor. ;-) The IBL really shows on the cruise missile which has an awesome realism in this image. :-)

` Much better than the Previous one!! and it Evolved hehe 0_o