I also saved this out with a brighter exposure. I’m not sure which I like better. The darker one has the softer feel I was originally going for, but there is something about the brighter version that I like too.
Thoughts?
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Incredible result! How did you achieve it?
Thanks!
The scene layout is pretty simple. There’s a plane with weeds, grass, and flowers scattered on it. A dozen models of shrubs and trees are hand placed. The scene is encased in a cube with a principled volume shader, which has a gradient so that it is most dense at the ground and least dense at the top.
Lighting is entirely from the world shader, which is simply a Sky Texture node. The sun location was chosen to place it directly behind the big tree.
In the compositor, I deviated from a standard setup a bit, mostly adjusting how the different layers were combined. The softness came from two glare nodes. The first directly applied to the VolumeDir layer, and the second as the last node before the output.
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Very good work, thanks for this detailed explanation.
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
You were double featured, awesome 
Thanks, Bart!
As @MilanStankovic pointed out, there’s a glitch in the matrix, and this is shown twice.
Ha, two for the price of one I’ll update it!