I've never made a serious attempt on doing an outdoor scene so here is 
my first try.

I'm no botanist but I did some research on what kind of trees could have 
grown together in a mixed leaf forest on European hills during the 18th 
century so we have here 'Sycamore Maple', 'European Beech', 'English 
Oak', 'Red Oak' and 'Horse Chestnut'. Some of them where already in the 
standard XFrog library and I did create the missing ones with XFrog - 
which is in fact quite easy when you have some good reference photos.
All the leaves where 'painted' in autumn colors within Photoshop.

There are also a few thousand dead leaves on the ground, not just 
randomly distributed but with respect to the corresponding tree position 
but sadly this is almost not visible due all the fog, shadows, ferns and 
shrubs.

As almost every POVer I did create my own grass macro.
As a side note: my first quite naive version of using single grass 
blades and distributing them over the landscape didn't work out because 
this did quickly require more than 2GB of memory. I guess because each 
blade-mesh itself is instantiated but still requires its own 
transformation to be be stored. So I made a macro for creating an 
irregular grass patch and distributed those patches - and memory usage 
dropped to 100MB for the same amount of blades.

The ruin is made of spline based isosurfaces and the gravestones are 
also isosurfaces. Both made with the help of Christoph Hormann's 
excellent IsoCSG includes.

I'm currently quite unhappy with the distribution of the shrubs and 
bushes. I'll have to find some better 'rules' to pseudo-random 
distribute them.
And the overall look of the woods is too clean, what I have in mind is 
an ancient forest - so there is still a lot of research and work to do.

anyway, comments and recommendations are very welcome, especially since 
I spend almost my entire live within cities...

-Ive

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