Currently working on a forest scene either for a poster or desktop background. I got the basic structure of my scene and i need to add more shrubbery, rocks and other stuff to the forest floor. But i was curious how to get the whole forest sort of shaded (shadowed).
Any ideas??? 
Picture 1: An autumn version of the picture
Picture 2: Shadow test (want it to be lighter shade and cover whole forest area)
Picture 3: Reference Image of what Iâm looking for for the forest area
I would make treetops wider so they touch each other (as on that third reference image)
well right now it looks like something out of the game engine, try turning on ray tracing on you light(s) fyi hemiâs dont cast shadows also if you wanât (and I assume you do) your alphaâed textures to cast a shadow youâll need to turn on âReceive transparentâ on all materials under shadow on materials.
Im trying to make the lights use ray tracing. However i have disabled ray tracing in my scene because it keeps on crashing blender returning with the error (calloc returns null) suggesting that i do not have enough RAM (i have 5 GB). I found that you can render each scene separately and then join them in the compositor but i dont know how i would put the shadow on the grass if the trees were a separate render. Is there another way i have heard of baking but have been unable to understand it.
BTW thanks for great input!!!
You could use a shadow plane for each scene to get the shadows for the grass, not sure if that would give you the result you need, but it would be one way to go if youâre splitting things up. That still wouldnât get shadows from neighbouring trees falling on the next tree, but would help with the grass.
How would i get the plane to be transparent and the shadows to remain???
Add a material to your plane, click Shadeless under the materials tab, then go to the Shadow drop down menu (still in Materials tab) and click Shadow only.
As for the shading you want to achieve: The reference you provided has the camera placed between the trees, thats why it has that shading, also it has alot more bigger trees then your scene does. So if you want to achieve that kind of shading you should probably add more larger trees. Aside from that I think your scene looks pretty good 
Good luck!
Just did a test with that idea Rednaz with a cube. Works fantastically 
My only problem now is that when i do the same process for a tree the shadows are barely visible. Any way to increase the darkness or to actually see the shadow??? Is it the positioning of the spotlights ???. 
Fixed all my problems thanks for the assistance everyone. One of the main problems was the amount of subdivisions i was creating.
THIS IS AWESOME SO FAR. i posted something about this not to long ago. i have some questions so i can finish mine, how did you make the basic landscape without the trees, and how did you get those little bumps in the ground i still cant do it without making it look crappy
To create the bumps in the landscape i subdivided the plane and used the subdivision array to create more vertices. Then using the proportional editing mode i was able to move the vertices in a collective within range of the selected vertex to create a hill or bump. That is for the basic landscape. With regards to the grass i used a particle system. A good tutorial to create grass is the blenderguru tutorial.
I have sent you the url in a message. Hope that helps
If you have anymore questions just let me know
Hello,
I saw a good tutorial for textured and volumetric lighting somewhereâŚ
tutorial on creating textured lighting.
If your using blender 2.5 (dunno where/ if it would be in previous) you can use a spotlight with the option of âshow coneâ under the"spot shape" options. It will give the light cone effect like in your forest reference.
If your trying to make a dense looking forest also have you tried adding a shadeless plane with an image on it to give the impression the forest is alot deeper? Hope this helps 
Thanks for those tips. That Plane idea hadnt crossed my mind so ill definitely give it a try
thats okay, glad I can help
I look forward to seeing how it comes along
Ive decided to do a redesign of the trees because most of them are generated and the leaves have a lack of realism to it. Im using blender 2.5 so the method trees from curves script is not possible. If i can do a really good tree i thought i could use a lattice modifier and create variations for the forest.
Any good tree creation methods would be greatly appreciated
here to give you a nudge in the right direction 
hope it helps
Cheers. Exactly what i was looking for
haha good
look forward to seeing how its coming along