Rocky desert

[N810]

So what do you guys think ?

[GxMew]

good but a little vegetation would be very nice...

[tee]

sand blown across rocks, like the surface in foreground alot.

[Hetzen]

Good colours, looks out of scale.

[N810]

Here's another test version...
yea these renders are still a work in progress.
and I know the atmosphere is grainy.

[Hetzen]

As a study in surface, I think your first image is a triumph if you chopped the top half off. The lower part holds loads of subtle interest.

If the camera is head height, those rock outcrops on those two peaks look wrong, ie too small. Imo.

[N810]

mmmm do you think it would help if I put some tall mountains behind them...
or added more haze ?

[Hetzen]

I think neither.

Maybe increase the feature scale of you secondary displacement, or flatten those peaks out, boken up with some fake stones.

[Hetzen]

I think what's not helping also, are those drifts of sand you have limited to slope on the rocks. Looks like icing on a cake, where as my mind says the wind would have blown it off.

[Henry Blewer]

Use a large strata displacement on the terrain, in the terrain tab. Then limit your sands slope. This will help define the strata layers. A power fractal into the blending shader input of the strata can be used to limit the amount of strata visible. The shader preview window will show how much is being masked.

[N810]

I can't do a whole lot with the terrain because they are .ter files from the old 0.9x version

but I can change the sand shader to get off of the rocks some more. 
the sand didn't cling to the hills so much untill I added an erosion filter, and rounded them a bit.

A lot on the textures here are displaced image maping masked through paint shaders,
including the sand ripples and some of the othe foreground textures,
Also the displaced rock in the foreground is masked through a paint shader.