Hey guys,
I’m trying to model some house / farm from some hundred years BC located in syria / persia / israel.
This scene should be part of a simple 2-scenes adventure game.
This is our initial drawing of the “look and feel” we were going for: (Not photorealistic)
Cycles render (background image just for testing purposes):
Blend file (30MB with packed textures):
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/20471
Problems I need help with:
a) Cycles: Rendering the tree seems to cause trouble for Cycles because of the transparency. Pushing the “max transparency” to values higher than 64 crashes blender and the display driver (CUDA memory error, I got 3GB on my GPU). If I use low values (as in the render above) you can see that it doesn’t render nice (black in the back). Any idea around that?
b) The house corners are a straight line. How can I make so that the texture displacement effects the house corners, too. It looks too clean / flat.
c) Windows: At the window borders you can see texture distortions. How can I fix that?
d) The whole scene is missing the Andrew Price acclaimed “wow factor”. I feel that my camera placement and perspective is rather boring, same goes for the lighting and (no) shadows. I’ve tried to place some additional props like a broken vase but that alone doesn’t fix the scene 
Maybe adding some shadows from “non visible” trees helps, too?
This is the atmosphere I was going for (shadows, lighting):
Anyone want to jump in / give me some tipps? 