a sunset scene in a desert like environment with some mountains and yucca plants

The idea of the image came to me after looking through some books with landscape photographies.

I tried to capture the mood of a sunset in a desert setting. In the distance mountains are bathed in red sun light. Colorful clouds cover the sky.

In the foreground we see some yucca plants and scrubs.

sky

a sphere with gradient texture;

sun

a disc wit a spherical gradienttexture;

clouds

a single density file based on a bozo color map;

haze

cylinder primitives with scattering/absorption media;

mountains

heightfield with slope dependent texture map;

foreground

heightfield with granite texture and bump map;

plants

some macros that create plants with random deviations;

I used MORAY to design and control the overall setting. The plant macros were programmed with the POV-Ray editor.

POV-Ray 3.6.1 official version for rendering - Moray 3.5 for modeling overall scene settings and textures - Photoshop for conversion of image from PNG to JPG - POV-Ray to create image slices of density files for clouds - tga2df3.exe by PodD to transform image slices into density files - World Maschine 0.99 beta by Stephen Schmitt (Shareware) for heightfield of mountain

None

Too much work on the clouds (that turn out impressive but still not so convincing) and as a result we can't see anything on the ground.