Over the ruins of Nuaponec, an ancient city once held to be the legendary city of fool’s gold. Re-discovered in 1892 by Joe Smith, a coal shoveler on the airship Gigantic, the city is now a regular tour stop in the Americas.

The best way to view it now, as then, is by air, and Ancient Aztec Airliners (AAA), established 1903, provides the most luxurious adventure trip for the discerning traveller.

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All that said, this is a Vue render with rather a lot of postwork done in Photoshop. It’s given me a lot of grief too – I had to render it in layers because my quad-core, 8Gb RAM, 64-bit computer simply could not render the thing in one go. Sigh. So this is not exactly the image I had in mind when I started 🙂

Full view here.

Vue render … took 28 hours to complete the render … due to the procedural terrain and the reflective materials, no doubt 🙂

Tiny bit of postwork done with Photoshop.

Full view here.

Vue render, no postwork.

Using Gendragon’s Basichill01 prop.

Had lots of fun working out the procedural texturing of the hill prop, but I think it came ok in the end.

Full view here.

Vue render .. an extrmely long process to get everything just right! Many thanks to my friend Haarsha for allowing me to keep fiddling with it during her visit!

Mirrors and reflections make you work twice as hard 🙂 You have to consider the back view too! I modelled the skirt in Blender and used Poser’s cloth room to drape it. And of course SkinVue for the skin…

And hey, I used Global Radiosity for the lighting model – this image took 6 hours to render … (and I rendered it 7 times before I was happy 🙂 )

Full view here.