Lighting Exercise

After viewing some inspiring lighting tutorials, I decided to go ahead and do an exercise to see what I could do with my new knowledge, I love the ambient occlusion hack I've learnt, It's great.
Render took 40sec's, with a decent computer it would come way down. Pretty happy with the quality for a 40 second render. Having problems with the shadow casting...

Environment 1.c

Here's the renders I'm handing in. Slight post work, but overall satisfaction with what came out. After this I've come to the conclusion that I'm in need of learning how to render efficiently, also need to learn how to render in layers and passes. Skills to learn for another day, for now: Topology issues to get maximum use out of the deformations. 

Environment 1.b

Some new additions, having trouble with the texturing of the actual cliff face, but anyway here's another picture of the environment in it's mutating phase, hopefully at the end I have something really cool to show for it! 

Environment 1.a

An environment for the Eli Project, Not my favorite time, still a work in progress. During these past 2 years, I can say with confidence that my passion lies in Characters. Character animation, design and modeling.