this is my first Image on blenderartists, my name is Bernhard, I’m from Germany.
I made this scene for the Blenderguru competition, but I made a new render last weekend because the old was even worse than this and regard it as finished now.
It is rendered in Luxrender and composited in Blender. Due to automatic resizing I add an external link to an image with the original resolution: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=24270
In the revised version I added DOF, fixed several materials, added Dust and changed a lot of the post-processing-settings so it looks a bit more “realistic”.
I think that the scene looks really realistic and is very atmospheric. However, the tree lets it down. The baubles are fine, but the wood - colour, shading and texture look wrong, and the needles are too uniformly long and straight. Remove the tree and it’s a sweet scene, but of course no longer Christmassy.
I think it is supposed to be a fake tree, sort of sad. A real tree wouldn’t be available in an underwater station. Very nice work, interesting subject matter.
