Oh crap…I tried rendering it with Yafray, and the image I use on the sign disappears 
Also, pretty much anything i try in the “Map To” panel doesnt seem to affect the final render even though it changes a lot in the material preview.
Wrong image format! Try using TGA.
Ok well I changed the light to sun, and changed the image format to tga, and came up with this :
The only problem is I cant seem to get the sparkly/flecks effect to work like I want it to
looks alright!! exept the shadow should be at an angle in my opion
can i see a behind the camera screeny?
ok, thanks
So, turns out the flecks from the paint texture come from a voronoi type thing, is there anyway to use that to make my sign look any better?
hmm… about the sign try adding some bumps, rust or dust to it. You know… like real signs. Try to search some images or go out yourself and observe ;). Oh, and about the sun, rotate it a little cuz we can’t see the shadow. Keep it up!
As far as I know the only way to get procedurals into yafray is bake them with BI to a UV Map and use that. Or in other words procedurals don’t work in Yafray. But please correct me if I’m wrong.
I suggest you add a grass texture to the grass particles and map it like you would a cube.
Using the Blender Internal renderer I suggest you go to “World buttons,” then go to “Texture buttons,” and add a light blue sky texture(look here for some sky textures: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=24038 ). After you do that, go to the “Ambient Occlusion,” settings. Press the “Sky Texture,” button. Set the “Energy” slider bar to 1.75(I’ve found 1.75 energy to be the most realistic with the “Skt Texture,” button pressed). Click the “Map to,” tab and unpress “Blend,” and press “Hori.”
or add those circle wholes you always see
for the sign with the scratches…
it’s easy… if you know how to use uv mapping…
search blender wiki…
but just in photoshop or gimp or something like that…
make a texture the same hex colour as the sign that you have.
and then add scratches in photoshop… then uv align the picture… then your set. you will have variety along the sign…
shannon.
Ok so I moved the sun light because the shadows werent visible, I added the sky map thing, and I’ll look at adding some hole to the metal bar and scratches on the sign. I also removed one light because it was now useless (and created 2 shadows from the same object which didnt look real at all). In compensation I had to boost the suns energy value.
If I’m not mistaken to create the wholes out of the post i have to use booleans or something like that?
If you have enough edgeloops on the post you can cut em out with the knife tool and some vertice pushing. Either way its a lot of work. You could ofcourse use a transparency map to achieve the same thing.