My entry for the Seasons of 3D contest - the season I chose was summer.

That said, I'm not sure how to even begin telling how this came about. I've been tinkering with ideas for a beach scene for months and had several Terragen scenes laying in my WIP folder(s) with no further inspiration in sight. When this contest came along I knew it was time I put this one to rest and surged ahead on it. Did quite a bit of work within the last week or so and about 60% of it took place in the last two days. I had so many ways I wanted to take this but in the end it came down to what felt natural based on the time I had to work on it.

Terragen used to create the base scene, then various stock (from Mayang, SXC, morgeFile, etc.) was used for all the trees and objects on the beach, and lastly the planets and other various elements were created mostly from scratch in Photoshop. This was one of the largest images I've done in terms of layers - I think the count was somewhere around 125 as I neared the end. Not uber-impressive but still a lot to manage!

I'm pretty happy with this one, not so much because of the quality or composition or anything like that, but because I was finally able to get an idea out of my head and into my gallery. A lot of this I came up with on the fly but I think it's a good step towards future works in that I want to focus on more detailed scenes from time to time. There's a lot you can't really see at this resolution so perhaps I'll toss up a few snapshots from the big version later on.


Enjoy!