hi all,
What is your guys opinions on this picture?
Looks like the land is sitting on top of the water. There’s a bit of a shadow right at the waterline that looks like it’s cast by the land mass.
It’s a nice angle, but it doesn’t have a distinct style so far. Right now–since it’s shiny and has only a little variation, the rock looks a bit like plastic. If you want it to be more light and 'toony, look into some toon shaders, and more clear, bright, saturated colours, and look into a bit of colour theory.
If you want it to be more realistic, look into a site like http://cgtextures.com/, get a nice texture and make it tileable in photoshop, and get it a nice fast normal map with http://www.crazybump.com/ and hook it all up to a good rough-looking shader.
Which-ever one of these options you take, rock–unless it’s wet or made with a crapload of quartz, or volcanic or some such–is not normally that glossy. So try using a ramp texture to make the rock less shiny as it gets further away from the water.
and put on a skymap…i too once did a scene like tht a couple of hundred years ago, and did not use a sky map…use one and it should look good…rest boe has already said, and btw, thnx boe for the texture sites, i didnt know they existed…thnx a lot…
and crazy, there seems to be too much normal mapping on the water, it seems as if the entile valley is shaking and the thats causing the water to look the way it is…tone down the nor value a bit and probably strech the texture slightly along one axis.
btw, here’s the old reder i did back in my early days with render (notice the garish bold © ANURAAG as if this was going to be hailed as a masterpiece 
)
thanks for all the replies! sry i dont have photoshop so i cant make a good rock texture anyway here’s the updated version. (could an admin maybe move this to focused critique?)
Admin could you move this to focused critique please.
Anyway here’s an update:
Since you don’t have photoshop, use the Gimp, which can also make images tileable. And is open source.
i need a tutorial to do that then
Here it is. You know, I just googled “Gimp tileable textures” and there it was on the first page, third one down. Actually, all the links on the first page went to various gimp tutorials related to making tileable textures. 
Google is my friend.
You should look in to terragen, it makes landscapes randomly and can export wavefonts. www.planetside.co.uk
Take the old version, it is much easier to use.
Spenn3: Actually I’ve used terragen quite a bit already…i disagree with the first version being easier to use. I actually prefer tg2 to tg1 by far…it just takes a little bit to learn
It looks good, but I think the water in the latest picture is a bit dark compared to the sky. Also, maybe you could add some under water detail such as rocks and maybe plants.