Modelled, textured, lighted and rendered in Maya 5 Complete.
Composited in Adobe Photoshop.

Visit my homepage http://www.etlea.com to hear more about the floating island of Etléa.

This frame is actually part of a 50 second animation. I re-rendered the image with a 1280x768 resolution plus raytracing. The animation resolution is only 720x408 and I used no raytracing - I am very impatient and the maximum render time I can accept is around 3 minutes per frame.

The hardest part was to make the clouds look realistic - I have no access to the gas-simulation of the Unlimited Version (which is completely useless anyway, because render times are like 45 minutes for a 720x480 pixel frame), so I had to fake the clouds using particles.