Ok so, I did as I said…. I spent some time in C4D. Actually, I got a little carried away LOL I couldnt help it tho, I was cracked out. But at least this one makes sense.

This started out as a couple splines I drew, which I used a sweep nurbs to turn into 3D meshes (with the end point set very small, so it tapered), lowered the subD levels and used a twist function to twist them up (I really wanted to mess with the twist today, which is soooo very cool) Out of that, I saw twisty, barren trees… and thought itd be cool to do a scene with em. So, I kind of went with it.

From there, I applied an array to my 2 twisted tree branches, and adjusted the individual pieces, to turn them into a barren mass. Added a wood material and adjusted the scale. The trees are duplicated en masse and spread randomly thru the scene. I figured out how to add an environment with fog (but I ended up 86’ing the fog, coz it wasnt the right mood) the sky, to which I applied a material (and adjusted the scale on that, so it looked “cloudy”) and a terrain object (which was further deformed than the terrain settings allowed for, by using the magnet and pulling up at the mesh in random areas) Applied a clay material to the terrain.

3 Lights are added to the scene, all have soft shadows enabled, one has a lens flare applied (which mimics the sun thru heavy cloud cover) The ground’s light source could’ve used the intensity ramped up, but its only for practice anyhow. The back trees are excluded from the light sources, so they are darker (took me a bit to figure out the exclude light dialog, but its really neat too!)

Finally, I imported Belthazor, added a bone-esque material, duplicated him and buried him in the sand at random. Total render time: 26 minutes. No books, no tuts, no help.

Yeah…  I could *easily* get used to this LOL I might have to start learning how to render my normal scenes in C4D