Aspen Dawn

[aknight0]

Aspen forests descend from mountain heights under the golden glow of dawn.

Gannaingh's nice alpine scenes got me excited to try some too   

Snow mask from Gaea, plants from Xfrog and Archmodels.

[aknight0]

A closeup.

[aknight0]

And a widescreen version for my desktop background.  

[WAS]

Very nice! Lovely shots. Maybe a tad-less translucency in the foliage but other than that I like them. I really like aspen forests too but never tried them yet. I do think I have them i my xfrog volume. I'll have to check.

[Kadri]

Nice image.

[mhaze]

Very nice!

[Hannes]

Wow, that looks amazing!! I really love that first image especially. The only thing that looks a bit weird to me is that yellow tree. Somehow it reminds me of a feather duster. I don't know if maybe some more irregular tree with a little more color variety might look better? Just my opinion.

[DocCharly65]

I can echo exactly what Hannes said - including that with the tree. I know this tree from Xfrog, right? I hope you can find a replacement in your arsenal, that would be the perfection of the renders.

But except this special tree an unbelievable beauty - every one of these renders

[Gannaingh]

I love the sense of scale and openness in your first image!

The aspen trees could do with some subtle color variation. Using the color function within the object node has really helped me get subtle variations within a single population which, I think, helps realism and saves my computer from loading additional populations.  

Great work!

[WAS]

Translucency is hard to dial in sometimes across species.

[aknight0]

I actually quite like how the yellow aspens turned out, they remind me of quaking aspens in the Rocky Mountains (ref).  Personal preference I guess.     Here's a version with another tree and some more color variation.  I'm not sure I like this one quite as well, the trees didn't blend quite as nicely as the first one.  

[Tangled-Universe]

Definitely prefer the first version, if you don't mind me saying.
The first version has such a great sense of scale, has much better more vibrant lighting and has pretty crisp rendering.
If I look at the first version I'd think of adding some erosion channels and talus fields with more greyish skree.
I think in the end that will give a great palette of colours, because your aspens are really nice looking.
Great work!

[DocCharly65]

In fact the first one seems the little bit better choice.

Does the tree have several instances of leaves? Sometimes it helps to "delete a part of the leaves if the tree looks strange to "lighten" the look. I usually do that with setting the opacity of some of the leaves shader to "0". Same I often do if I need but don't find a winter version of a tree.

[aknight0]

Finally circled back around to work on this one some more.  I decided to go back to the original trees, and added some talus fields, a few tweaks to the bushes as well.  Added a little color variation to the aspens (maybe not enough).  Path traced again, since that seems to make a big difference in this scene (v2 was not PT).  

[Gannaingh]

I think the talus makes an excellent addition! Great image!