Hi All,
Here is a scene of grass and daffodils near the water’s edge. All the models used in this scene are open source and downloaded from various sites such as ShareCG, Renderosity, Blendswap and others.
Rendered in Cycles with the integrator bounces bottomed out. A single Sun lamp and a sky background texture light this two hundred and ten sample video.
A beautiful scene Atom. 
Would like to see it a little brighter but maybe you intended it to be more of a sunset scene.
Yes, now that I see it on my laptop, it does look a bit diminished. I opened it up in Photoshop and noticed the histogram was off a bit on the high end of the color space.
Here is a color corrected version.
That looks much better.
what about clouds in the sky? it will make the render much more realistic 
@iii210:Can you post a node setup for Cycles that shows how to make clouds in the sky? I am just learning Cycles.
use a sky dome set that as your emitter
@chrisspoi: I have heard of the sky dome technique mentioned before in a 3Delight thread.
Part of what I was trying out in this scene was the mention that you can essentially emulate Blender Internal with Cycles by using a single Sun lamp, the background and setting all the ray bounces to zero. This does work and renders just as fast or even faster then Blender Internal in some cases. I had to turn up the bounces in this scene. I set all ray bounces to one and then turned up Bounces Max to two to make the water work correctly. The more reflections in your scene the more bounces you will need to see through them.
I wonder how the sky dome with an image map might impact performance? I’ll have to give it a try.
Here are a few more stills from this 450 frame animation, which is still rendering…day three.:o
It’s a very beautiful scene!
(However can daffodils really blossom in water? I’ve never seen any in water…Anyway, that’s just the biologist in me speaking :D)
I wondered if someone might call me on that.
a time ago i founded a post that explained how to render skies in cycles but now i dont remember… sorry ^^" but if you search in google i think you will find it!! i really think that clouds in the sky will make this scene more realistic and really great!!
-sorry for bad english 
How to Render Skies in Cycles
You can dowload an HDRI sky map from here.
(Note: If you want to see the changes in the Node Editor select the “World” icon in the node Editor.)
Thanks for the HDRI sky info!
My render is finally finished so I posted it as a video at the top of this thread. It looks a lot better in HD so watch it on Vimeo, if you can.
