Thanks tekrom, I’ll work on the lighting a bit more and hopefully get some dimension in the snow. Here is an update with snow and leaves on the vines and garland on the columns. Thoughts are welcome:)
Update:) Added proper door with handle and knocker. Also added wreath and made a real modeled brick entry landing. Need to make a door mat and falling snow. Note that right now this render is direct from Blender with no compositing:) I will add some glow and things for the final touches. Blender tells me the scene is using 10gb and takes 13 hours to render 1920x1275 at 50 samples which is going to be a problem in terms of deadline!
My critiques at the moment: sorry if you noticed these already.
The lighting could be a bit brighter? (at least the light parts) and maybe get a bit of variation on the snow?
The window in the door seems a bit small.
the 20 and 14 seems a bit odd, but is it this way so you could see all of 2014? Up to you what you want here… I would probably put the numbers closer to the lamp. (This is assuming you wanted to make 2014 completely visible.)
Maybe change the material of the frame the climbing vines are on?
Other than that, it looks great!
Thanks for the feed back ctdabomb, I adjusted the lighting and the address numbers a bit:) Since my focal point is the door and the image follows a pyramid rule I’m going to keep the lattice (the thing the vines are climbing) white similar to the shingles on the house.
I did add flowers and a door may however I messed up and didn’t have the layer the mat was on turned on so it only rendered the shadow:( I’ll have that fixed tonight. I also added snow and some glow to the light and the windows on the door. The glow on the door windows is a bit strong but that is easy to fix. I want the viewer to wonder what’s inside and want to enter:) I think the glow conveys warmth and all things Christmas:) Anyways let me know your thoughts.
Another update:)
Well here is basically the final version. I will post this in the finished projects section. Let me know if you guys still have any thoughts. At this point I can only do compositing effects. I’m basically out of time for rendering. I would love to do a 500 sample render but I believe it would take 30 hours:eek: on my machine
I guess it’s a bit late for comment, but here it is anyway 
my immediate thought was that I would like to have seen some alternative lighting. The warmth of the light from the lamp and window as a primary warm light source might have looked quite nice against the cool coloured snow and trees (so more of a night time scene). You could even have a couple of much sublter lights off to one/both sides for edge highlights, and would be perfectly believable since there could be windows, other houses or street lights too. It would make that front door seem ever more welcoming…if you wanted to push it even further (lots of work!!!) would be to have a family mother/father holding the child, dog by the feet…all welcoming you to their house. Maybe that is too predictable haha, but I would definitely have given the lighting a shot.
Don’t be afraid of a 30 hour render (unless your computer will explode), I’ve done that before and it’s fine as long as you have already checked a smaller lower sample render for any mistakes It’s just a waiting game! By the way, what is your CPU/GPU? I have a i7-4770K if that is any quicker for you if you wanted to re-render. I also have a 4GB 770 GTX but I expect your trees are going to rule that out in terms of memory.
Thanks Matt, I totally see where your coming from on the lighting. Unfortunately I’m out of time:( I may do a night render with the neighboring homes and street lights giving some nice rim lighting but that will have to wait till after the competition. As far as adding people;) I would love to but I know my character game is not as high as my nature game and more than likely the people would bring the scene down. This scene was inspired by a commercial here in the states. I’ve take what I liked from the reference and added my own touches but the lighting of the ref is actually less interesting than what I have come up with here (the sun off to the left casting shadows through trees).