There's so much things going on that I can hardly believe I ever got to this point. I could propably write a book of it Too bad that the small resolution and divx washes the finer stuff away. Like the rain, and some layers of fog... Anyway, the ocean is actually a fluids driven softbody plane (needed to be like this for several reasons. one of them being that i wanted to emit particles from the surface at specific points). The lightnings in the first shot are just flashing lights above a volumetric cloud system. In the second shot there is MR fog which is affected by all lights in the scene -> pretty heavy to render...