So this finally happened. My good friend Jscene provided a render and I scraped together some effects and a concept. I am so glad for the opportunity to work with this rendering genius on such a fun project and it's been too long in happening. Hopefully, we can release another one of these at some point. In the meantime, as always, enjoy!

You can check out his renders here:
http://jscene.deviantart.com/gallery

—Behind the Scenes—

To show you a little behind the scenes, I'll set up how I went about making this particular scene.

This beautiful render by Jscene was where we started the scene.

I started with what existed already before getting into major effects. The rendering glitch exploited to make the floating island in Terragen needed to be covered up, so I took some rocky textures and added them to the surface.

Next, I worked on the waterfall. Added some reflection and spray. We had also come up with the idea that it should be dragged along by a boat of some sort (thanks Dad!), so I started making the spray/fall/water trail follow the island.

I then added the boat along with reflections. I also added a trail to follow the boat. The rope was added next along with the post on the island.

Clouds were added to give a more interesting sky and I started color grading. At this point, we decided to add a waterfall to the foreground to give more interest to the piece.

The beginning of the waterfall! I also filled in the clouds myself to hide the higher clouds behind them. (Shameless plug: Have you checked out my custom cloud brush tutorial?)

The finished form of the waterfall. Many photos were sourced for this. Lots of going back and forth erasing and blending to make it look correct as well as finding the right parts. Easily the longest part of the process.

Final color grading and several adjustment layers gave this more saturation and highlights to give more depth to the picture. Super glad I got to work on this. :D