This one started out with a blue sky, no mountains, and no lake. It changed slowly, and ended up much better than what I thought I was making.

When you make your own images, remember after you finish, and before your ender, try wild new camera settings. This image improved greatly after widening the field of view. (I stopped short of tilting to the side.)

If I sell a million mouse pads, I could probably get a house like this. I average about 5 a month, so it may be awhile longer.

Most images have one thing that slows progress. Everything falls into place except the lighting, point of view, or as in this case waves. It took forever, but I am glad I stuck with it.

The background mountains were part of another image I did while in Alaska. It needed something, so I added a bedroom. I really like the subtle shadows and reflections.

I worked on lighting this one for several hours. I finally ended up with lighting similar to what I started with, the trick was to keep the pinkish mist from affecting the light inside the dome.

The valley and balcony were rendered in two separate 3d programs, and assembled in Photoshop

This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. I wanted it to be a view from inside an ant hill, looking down several tunnels at once. But since you can only point the camera one direction at a time I had to opt for a more cavernous approach.