Wow! It looks so real! (As far as the rending goes 
)
Would you consider making some tutorials on how you created the snow and wood? I’m really curious how you did it.
Very inspirational
Oh my god!!!
How the hell did you achieve those materials?!? The rope, primarily, and all others are… stunning!
At first I thought the snowman was being tortured. His arms being pulled back by ropes + the tears made it look that way. So yeah, composition is extremely important.
This is really gallery stuff when making the image more readable. Good job!
How much RAM do you have?
It’s true that this goes from confusing to being instantly readable when rotated 90 degrees anti clockwise…
Probably due to us culturally reading text from left to right… so rotated the swinging motion aligns with our read… and the original comp it is perpendicular to our read… leading to it becoming more static and interpreted as a harsh drop rather than a fluid swing!
Materials are perfect!
The rope is incredible, How do you make it?
Very good job!
tears of joy to be riding so high?
amazing picture! A little confusing indeed, but given the quality your eyes go all around looking for the details to have a clean picture of the scene!
awesome snow material too. Top notch Blender image for sure.
Thank you guys for all your comments.
I’ve updated the first post with a rotated and clearer image of the scene and the second post with some wire/opengl screenshots, I hope them could be useful.
@ Carrozza and others
the rope is a profile extruded and rotated a certain number of time in order to obtain a repeatable module (360 degree, look at opengl shot in second post). A bezier curve defines the rope geometry.
The texture is mainly painted in Gimp with aid from Blender that I’ve used to model the thin transversal filaments. A particle system made the final job.
@bntser
if you exclude the heavily displaced plain (that is purely a matter of available ram) the snow is really simple, it even has no diffuse channel at all, it has normal map instead (used as displacement map too) and blueish sss to give it colors.
The wood is a bit more complicated, it has been painted in Gimp from a mix of pictures I’ve taken some months ago in the woods and hand painted parts. I’ve obtained three textures: diffuse, normal and displacement. If you add to this the big amount of details due to displace modifier you can see in second post the job is mainly done.
I do not promise a tutorial any time soon but I’ll put some effort in it to see what I come up with 
@PlanPerson
I’ve build a new system with 8 GB of ram which was always almost full during rendering sessions. Those rendertimes are calculated on a Core i7 860.
@Gionavvi and Micheal W
Thanks a lot for your critics about vert/horiz, a new version is added in the first post, hope it’s better.
Fantastic job, I’m very impressed by the materials you used.
Holy wow, this is a truly stunning piece of artwork. I love everything from the playful idea to the über-realistic rendering, great job 
I particularly like the rope, it is simply perfect.
Although as almost everyone says the composition is rather confusing and all over the place but works fine in the rotated image.
I just want to know TWO things.
How many poys in the entire scene, and which renderer?
Oh BTW it is epic-awesome sauce.
I’ve build a new system with 8 GB of ram which was always almost full during rendering sessions. Those rendertimes are calculated on a Core i7 860.
No wonder - the attention to detail is astounding. That was the first question that came to mind when I saw the close-ups. You must be having a beast of a machine to even think of working on such high detail. My laptop with core i3 and 3GB RAM just struggles with a simple particle system and crashes blender (almost) everytime I render it :(.
Your images came out incredibly well.
Stunning. I’ve seen one of you other works (atleast I think it was your) and this one puts the other one, which was fantastic, in the dust. Excellent work. Gallery worthy even. How did you do the scarf?
what a billiant concept
executed very nicely with muchas attention to detail, well done.
Thank you
I think you should add some motion blur and focal blur to the background. It should make it much clearer what’s going on.
I made quick test (lasso select and blur, so very low quality :spin:) and it seems already much clearer:
Breathtaking work! Composition, though (as just about everyone pointed out, I know, I know) needs a re-think.
Truly top-notch!
Wow! I’m extremely impressed that you didn’t only use materials, that the surface detail is all the object, itself. Just wondering, what modifier(s) did you use when you made the snowman’s head?