So, this was my challenge image. It didn't win, but I like my image. There were about 20 entries, all very good. Not sure who won yet. Here is my post from the competition: Elemental Vortex What? Never seen the ritual of the elements at the elemental vortex before? Well now you have :). The water is a plane with modified swirling water texture, I added reflection and specularity. The swirling part of the water is a symetrical lattice with the same modified swirling water texture. The grey/white vortext at the top is the same symetrical lattice copied from below and then I gave it a plain grey texture and turned up the specularity diffusion and made it transparent. This gave it volume without making the render time crazy by using volumetric clouds. The Elementals were all assembled by random rocks from Bryce. The fire elemental is using 2 different Bryce presets for the fire, plus my own version of a Clay's type fire. The water elemental is the same model duplicated and given a tropical water texture with added specularity. The rock elemental was given a defaul lava rock texture from Bryce presets and I added reflection and specularity to that as well. The Air elemental is the same model with a default volumetric cloud material. The swirling bit in the middle is a Bryce default object stretched out a bit and duplicated 4 times, turning it in different directions to separate them and given a blue texture with high reflection and specularity. The terrains in the back are Mordor shale with added specularity and default lava with added specularity. The sky is brooding sky and I changed some of the colors to a purple. Camera FOV set to 140. Standard anti-alias. no postwork, nothing imported. except signiature.