Hi Arttu,

Very nice image.  I love sunset scenes, and I like the mood and subject of your
image.  You've done really well with media.

That said, I offer a few things that I would do:

With such atrocious render times, I would actually drop the media--there's
nothing in this image that could not be achieved with a good skysphere and fog.
 In fact, a good skysphere could probably even offer a more realistic and
dramatic result.

I would also drop the focal blur.  I agree with the others--focal blur in this
image would be minimal, and it would be easier to simply add a little blur to
the foreground later in GIMP or Photoshop.  I think you'll find that focal blur
is the cause of the majority of your render time.

I think your greens are too green and too homogeneous.  My recommendation would
be to drop it down to something like rgb <.1,.2,.0>, but use a cells pigment
with turbulence 1, lambda 10 to get some nice, realistic variation.  I would
apply this to both the tree leaves and the grass.  I know you mentioned grass
being in the render, but I can's see it (perhaps because the focal blur is
obscuring it).  If it is there, I would make it much taller and more irregular.
 For the foreground, I think you need to add some quite tall grass and
vegetation.  Gilles Tran has several varieties of grass-like plants that you
could add.

I don't know what method you used to create the terrain, but I think adding some
more irregularity and character would add a lot.  When I create terrain, I
usually use an isosurface or a pattern-generated heightfield using a function
based on something like this:

function {
  pattern {
    wrinkles
    poly_wave 3
  }
}

Or, you could start with the terrain you have, but use trace to drop in
isosurface rocks and boulders along the banks of the river to get a bank that
doesn't simply slope straight into the water.

Those are my suggestions; I hope you find them helpful--I look forward to seeing
what you come up with.

Kirk

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