I started this in response to the challenge, as alltaken did.
this is what I have so far… no render yet. I haven’t done much with the textures.
I couldn’t figure out the script that generates trees and leaves so I just modeled the tree by hand. Its not finished yet of course…hence “wip”.
added some leaves to the tree… hope you like! I know its more 2D but from far away it looks pretty good.
c&c welcome!
i think the tree trunk and the branches look very good. that’s the best tree i have seen yet for this proect.
hmm…I redid the tree into a more “weeping willow” type… pretty much finished modelling everything and am trying to render now. Taking a LONG TIME…I have AO at 8 samples as is OSA. man…whats gonna take the longest is the grass at the top of the floating dirt thingy…Hopefullly it won’t freeze!
ok the render finally finished…but its not as good as I would like…here it is
c&c please! 
Nicely done.
My only suggestions would be that the tree should glow somewhat, perhaps a few well placed light blue halos…
The background isn’t working for me, perhaps rendered stars would work better…
I agree with others, from what I can see of the tree it looks solid!
h
Aziz light! Its too dark but your texturing and modeling looks great aside from the background (as already mentioned) It needs some more orange glow! be proud of your modeling 
Don’t hide it in the dark!
thanks!
hazmat: I was going for the “somewhere in the universe, there is a world with a lone tree floating in the air above a mysterious well” look. I agree with you though, I need to change the background.
Desoto: The Fifth Element!! lol…thats a great movie! anyways… thanks for the c&c. Believe me, I love modelling and I don’t hide from my models! It took me about 4 days of on and off work to make this scene, so my god, I’m gonna show it off!
I think that the “floating dirt” underneath the tree could use some new texturing…looks flat… I’ll get rid of the background and put something else there…Also I will add to the ground around the well, little rocks and pebbles here and there. The “hills” in the back will proably be redone and made into actual mountains or something.
thanks!
zachboy
I like the idea, the background is a good place holder, however I’m sure rendered stars would look more…well, void like.
Now I’m really interested in how you add some “glow” to the tree, as I think that makes the tree more mysterious.
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me too… not sure how I’m gonna do it yet…but I’ll try your suggestions firtst!
thanks:)
Your image looks great, but it is VERY dark. If your monitor isn’t calibrated correctly you can always open the render in an image editing app and take a look at the histogram. This will give you an indication of whether your pic is bright enough or not.
Cheers,
b01c
actually…theres a reason for the picture being dark. but this will be “corrected” when I add the glow to the tree.
Dam thats a darn good tree! Maybe you’ve seen my sad example of alltakens tree in this forum. Can you hint me on how you’ve modelled yours?
good work
//styken
I used dupliverts a lot…lol. I made a leaf and duplicated it several times and then joined those leaves to a stem mesh. Then I made a twig mesh that comes from the tree limb and hangs down… and I dupliverted the leaf and stem on the twig mesh…then I duplicated that and positioned each “twig of leaves” on the tree accordingly. I modeled the trunk by making a circle and changing the vertices to match the shape of the trunk that I wanted, then I extruded and scaled until I got what I liked. I extruded the branches from the trunk and just moved the vertices around until I liked it.
I decided to just ad a volumetric halo as the glow for the tree… I’m waiting to see how it turns out…still rendering. Also made the scene brighter and added blenderstars instead of that universe image.
Edit: changed my mind about the volumetric halo…instead of one, I added several light blue spots on the layer with the tree and the layer with the stones surrounding the tree to make the whole thing sort of glow blue…ish…hope it works!
ok here it is…just finished and posted for your pleasure.
Fountain of Youth:
c&c appreciated. I’m refining for the final before I enter it into the contest.
I like the way you modelled the island.
The scene needs an overall increase in lighting. I can barely see the chains. The stonework around the edges of the well looks great.
I like what you did with the tree, although it looks like it’s reflecting light from a light source (that is only shining on objects in its layer?). The blue needs to be more varied, and maybe look like it’s emanating from the tree itself?
oh and the horizon’s to flat. could probably be fixed fast with an image in the background of some distant shadowy mountains…
Nice work on this! I like your rendition.
Grass looks great. Lighting is pretty decent… although I’d go for a bit more brightness in the hole, at least in the deeper parts that we can see.
The tree turned out really good. Some of the leaves look a bit chunky… look kind of like a bunch of gingerbread men hanging there or something. Not sure if that’s the lighting or if they reall are fat leaves.
I also like the stone texturing. I’m really struggling with that in my version of the tree.
Me likes!
thanks for the compliments! It makes me feel more confident about my blends.
Gr8RedShark: The tree is reflecting light from spots in its own layer…I didn’t want the blue light to hit the ground underneath. I’m not sure how to make the tree itself emanate the blue light…normally giving the tree an emit value makes it appear more flat than I’d like. About the darkness of the image…I feel that if I increase the lighting, then it will ruin the mood of the image. If you can give me an idea as to how to increase the lighting while keeping it a “nighttime” mood, I’d appreciate it! I’ll work on the background some more.
penitentman: I think the chunkiness in the leaves is the lighting…I’ll work on that. Thanks a lot for the compliments! I got the stone to look this way from a very high resolution image texture with the “filter” value set to .35.
hmm…it takes a very long time to render this image… I have osa at 8 and ao at 8 samples… resolution at 1024x768…rendered at 100%. I have an amd athalon xp 2200 oc’d at 2.2 gigahertz and 256 megs of ram…not sure why its so slow. also I have a GeForce FX 5200 (pos) card but its done well for me until now. I’ve been rendering my final for 3 hours now. Any suggestions?
it might be my lighting setup. I have global illumination with dupliverted spots focused on the well and tree…that could be what it is.