Here’s early version of my work. Mix of ice, sand (at the moment), snow and jungle (later).
Rendering time is around 15 mins in full HD
Feedback and ideas are welcome
Feedback and ideas are welcome
very cool idea, but my opinions:
sand - needs a noise tex
ice - needs sharper spec and should distort the background more
tree - very strange spec
shadows - too sharp. are you using BI?
if the sand really shaped into a canyon like that, some sand would be falling down. try this with particle systems
its an awfully small canyon - barely wider than the tree. also, the ice blocks are bigger than the tree, and that is a very desolate tree with no leaves. if the canyon was shaped like that, the ice and tree would recieve almost no light. also from where the shadow is pointing, the sun would have to be inside the canyon to make it point like that.
so, my advice - make te canyon bigger and wider, shrink the ice or maybe try to make a glacier, add some leaves to the tree, add textures to the sand, and then go ahead and add the snow and jungle 
Ok, i’ll add more noise on sand.
Yep I’m using BI, someone told me that shadows are to sharp. How to reduce it?
Particles its awesome idea! Thanks.
Basicly idea of my work is based on paradox, and somthing incredible.
I need to fix tree texture, I’m going to make it more frosty same with ice.
I think that canyon is bad describe of work, it’s sometng like “cave” or ditch, so I won’t make it bigger
Thanks for advice.
P.S
I’m so stupid I reduced time of render to 3 mins just by reducing sample rate and changing sample method and final result is very similar 
if you want to stick to BI, you can use area lamps, but i would recomend switching to cycles because you can get awesome materials and soft shadows and other goodies it will bump up the render time though
