3D Background--Title Screen

[LimpingFish]

I have no money either.

Bryce 5 was given away free for a time by DAZ3D.

You should try Terragen.

It's free and pretty easy to use. You're limited to 800x600 renders, though, but other than that it's fully functional. There's a number of plug-ins available for it too.

[zabnat]

I always felt that moray+povray was kinda clumsy, although I haven't tried it for years, but on the other hand I haven't seen anything really nice made with it so I assume it's still the same. Terragen gives you outstandingly beautiful terrain renders with minimum effort, sadly it's pretty much all that it can do (I don't know about plugins, been years when I last used the whole program). But I would choose Blender+yafray for all-around-free-3d. Maybe give them a shot, but if you feel more comfortable with moray+povray and you feel the features are enough for you, then stick to them.

As for the picture. Horizont can't be clear if there's fog. I like where you've gone with the shape of the island, before it was just a triangle shape, now it's much more interesting rugged shape. But the lighting, in your last versions you have the island much too dark and before you changed the shape of the island all I saw was a dark triangle. The shape change helped to see some structures on the island as silhouette but I think you need some more lighting on the building still. Also when the island changed, so did the all this "big stucture on small island" scheme, I'm not sure if you wanted this.
Some more observations. Your moon is not round  :o (you don't happen to have 1280x1024 resolution on a 4:3 screen, do you?)
Wave size could be something between your's and LimpingFish's. This way the ocean would be more interesting to look at. The sky does look like if it was a photograph of stars shot in space, so maybe you could put some dark blue shades to it and make the stars a little less visible.

[Captain Lexington]

I started out with Moray and I have always felt an emotional connection with it, but I downloaded Blender around noon today. I'm gonna see if this is any good, and if it is, I'll switch, and remake the island scene in Blender.

[rockeh]

Slightly offtopic, but switching to Blender might be the best decision, since it's powerful, adaptable anmd free

Now, if only the splash screen had Don't Panic, written in large, friendly letters... The interface rather sucks, but version 2.5 will have a brand-new interface, rewritten to be more user-friendly.

As for Yafray, I dunno... if your computer can handle it, fine, but if you don't have 1 GB of RAM, I'd suggent sticking to clever light rigs in Blender, with some photoshopping afterwards.

/$0.02