Experimenting with rocks and lighting, I don't think I've got realism completely but it's getting there.
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Add a power fractal to the color channel. Use the two colors in the power fractal with little contrast. Make the colors a little lighter on the top, and a little darker on the bottom. They should be similar to the sand's color. Unless you want to add ripples to the sand, I would turn off the displacement function of the power fractal.
This should give the surface a little more interest. You may have to play with the scale settings on the power fractal, but It may not be necessary.
Nice Pov and lighting - I'd also use a PowerFractal to make the stones appear more randomly :)
Try to limit the stones to areas that are not so steep. It looks a bit unnatural the way your stones are distributed.
So advice taken on board and attempted to put that into practice, and well I think it is an improvement, thanks. Anything else ? a bigger render is needed for sure.
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For my taste, the sand is just a tad too dark now, but otherwise it's shaping up as a nice image. The simple cirrus layer works pretty well.
I think this is fine. I would add some sparse plants which would grow in very dry climates. Not too many, but enough to make it look 'living'. The sun peeking over the hill is great.
This is my final version on this one, played around alot with surfaces and rocks, could not get objects to work on this scene for some reason, getting grass in mid air not sitting on the floor. My vision was a wasteland of dust and rocks so I'm happy with the result.
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full size version here
http://private-tee.deviantart.com/art/Desert-Wasteland-127128363
Did you try a population of grass? That should sit on the terrain. Otherwise, just move the object down. Right-clicking in the preview will give you the coordinates of a specific point in your terrain, and you can then just paste that into the object's coordinates.
yep yep, population grass, trees whatever, altered size of coverage etc to fit area I wanted in front of camera, moved from 0 to camera position, repopulated and used preview and lots of boxes in mid air which rendered the same position with tufts of grass in the sky. Beats me it's fine on other scenes I've tried.
I think this is a great render, very pleasant and well lit!
When I had that effect once, that population instances just would not sit on the terrain properly, reducing the patch size in the compute terrain node helped. I think I recall to have it set to 1m back then.
Regards,
Frank
I often use the distribution shader with which ever surface layer I want the objects to appear on as the blending shader. Normally this requires a high density to see any of the population. The plus side is that the objects fall on the terrain.