"And suddenly the Auric Dragon emerged from the night sky, lashing out at the meteorite and enveloping the city in its protective wings..."

One of my favorite abstract renderings I made while spending a year in Japan. The image more or less created itself out of an interesting combination of "Max Omega" and "Perpetual Dream" (both available at http://gerf.deviantart.com along with a bunch of other abstract art stuff, if you're interested) and the drop-dead amazing optics engine that Bryce sports. This is a straight Bryce render, no brushing or other Photoshopping done save for the title, watermark, and enhancing the dragon's color in the middle a smidgeon (to increase the contrast and make it slightly more red).

My only gripe is the pixelation on the right-hand side: that actually was the reason I re-rendered it so many times. Because of the method I used to make the image, there wasn't much I could do to fix the problem, since it was not in the geometry of the scene but in the optics. Which just goes to show me: this method is risky as all heck. Use SPARINGLY.

I feel ashamed for saying this, but really the hardest part of making this piece was waiting for the rendering to finish. Because of some oversights on my part, I had to re-render this thing about five times, and each time took many, many hours; this final render took over 11 to complete. However, this was on a 2004-era laptop... I'm curious how quickly I could rip this thing out on my current system. :P