Skid

Thanks Chris. That book sounds interesting, I'll have to check it out. I have tried trees (both polygonal and images with alpha channels) without much success. The polygonal trees are hogs on my Mac G3 and they tend to look very fake without proper texturing, although I have seen them done well by some people. I haven't tried VW/RW for 3D yet but I love VW for drafting.

I think I did a bit too much talking last night :-)I wasn't talking up my own images, just ones I've seen produced by C4D. I did post one at renderosity.com if you would like to look though... http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=grooveweld I don't know if that link will work or not. If it doesn't, just go to renderosity.com, then to the art galleries section, choose Cinema4D, look for the image by grooveweld

Cinema4D 7 is great for rendering architectural as well as organic images- its radiosity is top notch and its multi-pass feature is worth its weight in gold. For those who have C4D, do a search at postforum.com for the HDR tutorial (image based lighting) it is sweet. Over at renderosity.com C4D consistently has the best images, better than Lightwave, Max, and Maya. Over at 3dluvr.com C4D took 1st and 2nd place in the recent competiton there. Oh ya, I usually model in FormZ, export as VRML with colors defining the objects, render in C4D (VRML from FormZ puts individual colors into seperate null objects in C4D, easy for texturing) Enough praise, I have to get to bed...