This is an illustration for a college geology textbook. One of about 2000 for this particular book where I'm lead illustrator and a co-author. It took about 4 hours to do from start to finish. I use zBrush to create and detail out the terrain with the flat plain tool, and rough out the rocks and avalanche shape... then I use Lightwave to boolean it out of a block and add a rough texture to the surface. Then after setting up lighting and doing a hi-res render (this is a two column illustration - 5 inches across) I bring the final render into Photoshop to further detail the image up to illustration quality.