UFO Mountain

This image was inspired by the UFO sighting that originally coined the
term "Flying Saucer". The sighting occured over a mountain range where
the pilot of a small aircraft was witness to several unidentified silver
coloured, "saucer shaped" objects flying at very high speed...

This image was created over several evenings at my local university. It
utilises the new Natural Shaders for both the snow and water effects. The
excellent SkyTracer plugin was also used to generate the sky.

The water shader settings were changed slightly from the normal settings to
give a wider spread of transparency and reflection angles and the wavelets
and bump sizes were greatly enlarged due to the large size of the lake
object. A standard crumple bump map and a displacment map were also added
to create the water surface.

The snow shader settings uses a start/end slope angle of 5 and 50 degrees,
with a diffusion setting of 95%, specular of 50% and reflection of 5%.
Also small fractal bumps were applied to the shader to break up the effect.

The frame around the image was added in Photoshop along with a slight blur
to the water surface and the flare on the sun. The machine used was a
Pentium 200 with 48MB RAM.