Cliffs - From Concept to Completion

I was looking at my 2D landscape that I had painted earlier on:

I decided to make into a 3D environment. So after analyzing the painting, I jumped into Vue and started sculpting the cliffs on the left. I used my Wacom tablet to do this. I made a depression for my waterfall, but sadly did not add it in simply because I haven't figured it out yet.

The Cliffs Sculpted

I had to spend a lot of time doing the layout and placing the camera. For some reasons, I could not get the perspective to be exactly the way it was in the painting - maybe the perspective in my painting was wrong. So I moved onto texturing. I placed ecosystems on all the terrains except the distant background one. I spent a lot of time texturing the water too. I was going for a realistic look.

Then I moved onto adjusting the atmosphere. Most of the time was spent here because I could not get the look I wanted right away. I tried many different kind of settings for clouds, sun, fog and haze and when I was happy with the settings, I turned on global illumination and rendered the image. Rendering time: 2 hrs 10 min at HD 720p resolution.

Feel free to comment on this art. It's uploaded on my deviant art page at www.digimator.deviantart.com.