Hello, that’s my latest work. A fantasy place, no reference.
Some lore:
From a youth’s diary:
I think there is no worse time to fly over the high desert, it is hot and in a few hours it will be even hotter, but what a view! It happens once every 9 years.
Who knows if they ever gave a name to this phase…a setting sun and a rising one…a twin twilight, no…a twinlight ?!
…
I can’t wait to see the glare of the great lakes, they say that there, they will park the city for a while.
Nice work. I’d like to see this as an animation. The lighting is good, nice contrasts. Definitely something that could be used in a fantasy/adventure movie of some sort.
Thank you 
The rendering of the entire scene is too slow to do as an animation, but maybe i will create more scene with this subject to add more backstory at the entire concept, i had also think to reshade all entire scene with a cartoon style.
Ever considered Eevee? It’s good enough for animation. You won’t get the same realistic lighting, but you can get very far indeed.
Eevee is way faster than Cycles, and is therefore suitable for animations. Worth a try at least.
I preferred to use Cycles to be able to use true material displace with adaptive subdivision.
The terrain material displace it’s really complex, i think it’s impossible recreate the same with Texture and classic displace modifier to use it with Eevee.
Maybe with a mix of two tech is possible to speed up the rendering to create at least a simple 15 seconds video at 24fps.
Example: rendering clouds and desert with Eevee and then mix with flying objects rendered in cycles.
cool) I like. very cool job
Thank you and welcome to blenderartists!
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
You’re on the #featured row!
Many many Thanks Bart! 
Good weekend to you too
Impressive, for sure. How long to render?
The camera perspective seems kind of strong and would like to see more of the central object. Now, the side motor seems to have a lot of the visual space.
Thank you, i’m very happy that it likes!
I have splitted the rendering in two phases.
The first phase was dedicated at the clouds, that at 256 samples it took about 1 hour.
The second phase was dedicated for desert, flying city and the rest, that at 1024 samples have required about 45 minutes.
CPU + GPU rendering with denoise.
Yes, the camera is grandangular, i made that choice because the size of the entire flying city is truly big. I think it was impossible to fit everything into a normal camera if not placing the camera far away.
Whats the tri count?
As i say i used adaptive subdivision for all the terrains and desert, so it’s difficult to say how many tris and vertex when render.
In viewport the tri count is 5 million and ram usage is low, only 5gb, but when render the usage go up and fill all 24gb.
Trying to simulate adaptive subdivision adding 6-7 level of multires to have a similar look, the counts is 20 million of tris only for the island, so i think that all the entire scene with all modifier loaded and desert included, could counts about 25-35 million of tris.
what did you do to make the ground? Archimesh?
I don’t know about this add-on, but it looks very interesting, although I don’t understand how it can generate ground and terrains.
I didn’t use any add-ons, just one for tree generator.
All terrains were created using material nodes, mixing many textures.
That’s a video by Andrew Price, from Blender guru, who explains how it works:
The sun flares were added in post-production.
