Wow, man. Reeeeally nice.

> Note that the shadows of the columns will be made with arealights in the
> final version, but I left it out for time-consuming reasons in this
render.


Good, I was going to mention that.

You need more lighting from the front though; as Ger mentioned, the rose is
no longer the focal point. I would suggest trying a shadowless light to just
give some depth and visibility to the rose. Maybe even use an extra
spotlight on the top of the rose, or consider making the rose petals
themselves glow, or something. Bring back some of the focus to it.

Finally, you might consider adding subtle sunbeam effects to where the light
is streaming in through the pillars. The obvious way to do this would be
with scattering media, but that'd be way too slow. So if you want to do it,
I would recommend making some simple triangle meshes by hand which match the
shape of the blocks of light which are coming through the pillars. Since
there are hardly any shadows in this scene, the meshes could be very simple,
and as long as they're in just about the right place and all of their edges
are oriented towards the sun (this can be done with some relatively simple
vector math), they would look just like you used scattering media. Then
you'd just add a small amount of emitting media to them. (I used this trick
for the beams of light in
http://www.slimeland.com/images/pictures/PaddedCell.jpg .) Note that it's a
good idea to add a density{} which will make the lighting effect stronger in
the places where the light is coming directly from the sun to the camera and
weaker in other areas. Don't forget to add an object for the light coming in
from above the object the pillars are suspending. Keep the amount of
emitting media low so that the edges of the meshes aren't very visible.

Nice job.

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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