Stone Lantern

If you have never visited a Japanese garden, then this scene may seem a
bit strange to you.  The stone lantern, called a "toro", is said to keep
out evil spirits, not to mention mosquitoes.  Since I own a small
hospital in Kamakura, one of Japan's historical centers, I often go to
visit the nearby gardens at night, and this scene is supposed to depict
the koi pond at the Hahimangu shrine.

The two natural shaders present are the Water shader and the Rust shader
on the lantern. Rust and moss tend to develop similarly upon a surface,
first in groves and then spreading outwards.  So the nifty Rust shader
makes an ideal moss shader, and seeing that Rust is plagued with the
world coordinates flaw, it works better as a moss shader...a rolling
stone gathers no moss... The settings I used for Rust were nearly the
same as the default settings, except I turned the amount up to 40% and
of course I changed the colors to a dark green.  I experimented a lot,
and I found that ironically the "Course" setting worked better than any
of the others including the "Expensive" setting.

The water shader settings are nearly the same as the default as well,
but I turned up the Gain a bit to enhance the highlights.

I created the background trees with a few clipmaped planes, using images
of the actual Hachimangu trees for the clip maps. One layer has a
transparency map to add some depth to the image.

And in the spirit of Prem...The foggy moonlight gradient background
image was made with my "Amazing" new plugin, Dr. gradient.  You can
download it from my "cool stuff" section on my website.