Okay … here’s specific advise for general “technical” improvements to your artwork and realism:
- try not having so many areas pitch black. Add some details and some subtile lights.
- add microdisplacement or particles so you get some bark details in the tree silhouettes (I wohld not do it for all the trees, but for some)
- add more detail to the leaves, make them translucent.
- add a texture to the deers antlers emittion. Make the emission stronger a the root and fade it out slightly towards the tips
- make the antlers much much brighter. Add bloom. They would be a lot more overexposed, if they were the only light source in this scene
- add camera artefacts, such as noise and (as already mentioned) bloom.
- try adding a bit of texture to your fog
To give you a more general stylistic feedback:
- I think this would work a lot better as an intentionally stylized scene
- I would have the deer occupy a larger portion of your image
- I’m missing some sort of foreground and background … your scene seems to be kind of … mid-ground only
- your image currently kind of looks unbalanced, because you have a single point of interest, that is off center. I think I’d put the deer at the left of your clearing, so the right portion of your image (that contains more visible detail) can balance it out.
This way, the clearing and the deer could work as separate points of interest and balance each other our. - I’m not a big fan of the glowing eyes tbh…