I took my previous snow image, and pushed it over some kind of edge. It's well on its way to being another one of those pictures I want to hide in a deep file on my computer and never acknowledge again. I'm not really sure why that is, except that it has that too-slick, cartoonish quality that computer-generated graphics nearly always seem to have. Ultra Fractal has ways of adding noise and grit and texture to the base fractal, and I've used some of them a bit, but adding very much of that kind of texture mostly just makes the thing look like it's had a few too many Photoshop filters applied.
It may partly be a question of there not being enough variation in color, and that the variation there is is too regular and predictable. I've spent the last couple of months looking at mixed inks and paper in the real world, and have gotten used to the roughness and irregularity that comes with a physical presence.
Still, in terms of technical assembly and lighting effects, this one is getting close to done.
Snowglobe
An awful lot of layers, starting with a couple of 3-D quaternions as slightly surreal landscape elements. Heavy use of orbit traps for shading and highlighting and general effects, and more masking and transformations than I really want to think about at the moment.
