It looks great!
I would agree that it is in need of the “perfect crop”,I think
there is too much water in the view, perhaps the
camera could be closer to the water surface?
Thanks for convincing me to do the Nature Aacdemy , I am learning a lot and hope to
be as competent Blender user as you one day soon, cheers.

Thanks for writing!
Greg, I had no idea I convinced you to join NA, in this case.. I am really glad you like it! I hope to get to browse the tutorials some more myself and push it even further. Meet you there 🙂

Daniele, thanks for the input and the link on atmospheric perspective, it is most useful. Using it on this scene will make it look more like dawn I think, I love the idea, I’ll see if I can do it (or if my computer can take it)

Hey Oana,

Nice effort, I’m a little jealous of your skills. However, the devil is in the details, the final 5%, which can be the toughest 5% but essential for professional results. So put on a swimsuit and let’s dive in:

* Use Cubic 1.5 AA filter to avoid the oversharp CG look – feel free to slightly sharpen the central object though.
* Architecturally, the house seems small for this quality of design. Two bedroom bungalow? It doesn’t seem likely.
* Would a house like this really get built in a orchard, by a frog infested pond?
* Grass, bushes or stones needed at water’s edge.
* If sunlight is this weak, its shadow would be slightly blurry.
* Underside of the deck is very slightly overexposed (the green).
* Viepoint is a little flat, the trees offer an opportunity for better sense of perspective and scale from a different viewpoint.
* Bottom 1/3 of picture to crop off (top can be as well), add slight DOF to soften stalks of grass. (Stalks are too CG anyway, try making them translucent.)

Keep up the good work, it’s looking very promising. And I don’t envy you the pain of going that final mile… 🙂

Carrozza, the “mamma mia” made a very good start to my day 🙂 I also think that DOF on such scenes might give a wrong sense of scale and it’s not necessary. I would use it though, in small dose, to blur imperfections in the background.

Ray, you have a very nice way of offering critique taking care not to hurt someone’s feelings! I value the fact that you took such a close look and the time to write. You will finally succeed to make me look into Old_Demon’s trick 😛
You have a point about the architectural design, it probably shows it is not a real design and I didn’t take much trouble over it; but I’m not bothered by the idea of a small weekend pavilion on the lake, I think my family would love it and architects are allowed to build extravaganzas for themselves, then suffer for it! I wouldn’t mind frogs but when I see a lake I instantly cringe at the idea of mosquitoes! I know it’s a bit too close to the water for a real setup but let’s hope it doesen’t get flooded (Romanian traditional way of facing hardship). In the nature academy the lake is a more glamorous one with lily pads but I wanted to give it a look closer to what I’ve seen in nature and experiment painting that green goo (don’t know the English name, it’s called silk of frogs here)
In truth I just wanted a wow scene to display several interesting nature elements like trees and water and dusk light, just to prove it can be done in BI and add something more exciting to my Blender portfolio… I’ll consider all the other technical observations you made, the caustics would be nice but I’ll see if I can fake it in BI…

After I “finish” I will post more details about the project.