Been working on this off and on for the last two months. Suggestions?
The lake reflections are looking pretty nice!
I’d have two tips regarding the mountain.
The first being: Even a “Smooth” mountain, with lots of snow on it, has tons of little ridges and stuff. As seen in this picture:
The second being: The treeline is rarely so flat. In ravines the trees will go higher, on ridges the trees will be lower. (It largely has to do with what areas are sheltered from the wind or not, and access to water). As seen in this picture:
You might want to add a sky and fog
Thanks. I’ll give it another shot.
Resumed this after a brief hiatus for the Blender Guru SciFi competition. The mountains and trees were replaced, added a cabin, but clouds are still being a challenge. Thoughts?
Whoa. Comparing that to your first post is like comparing the chassis of a Model T to a tricked-out Ferrari. (okay, maybe not that big of a difference, but you get my point). Awesome. 
Thanks. I liked the original suggestions, and learned a bunch trying to implement them.
Still struggling with the clouds. Added some cirrus clouds and mist with noise textures. Suggestions?
It’s really a beautiful scene… Is this cycles or BI?
I like it. However, on close up the mountain is a little lowpoly, and the snow on the trees is looking like noise right now.
Add volumetric clouds
This is cycles, 50 samples, 2.5 hrs render time. The clouds/mist use the subsurface scattering shader, and that might be what’s killing the render time.
Nice Snow Scene. Its great looking.
It isn’t the subsurface scattering shader killing the render times, but the vertices count. Decreased subsurf subdivisions on the trees, and that helped the render times a lot.
Added a translucent shader to the trees to give them a frosty look, put a snow cap displacement w/ cracking texture on the mountains and added some snow geese (from a previous work). Now it’s 100 samples, 3.15 hrs render time, so it should seem less noisy.
I appreciate all the suggestions. Thanks!
aberation is to strong
It’s really coming along great, huge improvements over your initial post. The water seems much different to me in your last post… not sure what you changed, but it almost now seems like there is a thin layer of ice starting to form.
Thanks. The water didn’t change, but the mist was leveled to the xy plane and density increased. The number of samples may have changed the reflection quality as well.
Changed the mid-level clouds to a translucent shader, increased the scale on the mist, cut back on the dispersion. Here is the result with 300 samples (9 hours rendering time):
I think the snow on the water is too “fake” looking compared to the rest of the scene. You could try to mess around with the opacity of the snow/ice on it to see if that helps. Other than that, the scene is coming along great!
