My latest image.
Hi Res: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benamend/6093520697/in/photostream/lightbox/
looks really cool. i like it
my only suggestion would be to add some heat distortion
Anything else anyone? I can’t get heat distortion to work in Blender’s compositing nodes, so I’ll have to do it in an external program. Because of that, I’d like to fix anything else that’s wrong with the image before that.
add mountains
Yeah… add something more. Mountains, something to bring it to life. Maybe a different lighting setup (morning, late evening). It just looks bland right now. Give textures for the Observatory?
Have you tried this heat distortion?
S
Yes, that’s the heat distortion tutorial I followed, and it didn’t work. Something’s not working right with the Map Value Node. But I’ll add mountains, then upload that render :yes:
How’s this? I’m aware of the jagged edges on some objects, but I’ll turn on Full Sampling for the next render 
nice (happy face)
I feel the scene needs something else to be interesting. Perhaps add a planet in the background – something that attracts the viewer’s attention. Maybe you could do some people or vehicles in the scene to add to the completeness. Right now it looks too static and desolate, even real deserts have some “life” in them.
there is an andrew price tutorial about making an explosion that has a shock wave effect. With a little tweaking you can use that to make the heat distortion.
[withdrawn]
RiViT, is was supposed to be more of a sentry-type thing (where guards would be watching out for something), but I kind of like dleri’s suggestion on adding a planet, so I’ll probably end up doing that 
Maybe the people are observing how well that dessert has been rendered? It looks impressive to me.
Is the sand photo a texture?
looking at it makes the dessert scene I am working on right now seem like a really weak attempt…I may have to start over.
It’s not a photo. It’s a clouds texture. I raised the depth, turned off Color (under the influence panel), turned on Normal, and set the normal value to 0.5. Other than that, the ground plane is simply a slightly displaced mesh (I subdivided it fractally)