This is what finally happened to the dusk image, I tried to address part of the things pointed out in your comments, like I added an area light with a weird color trying to fake the light reflected from the water, and moved camera and trees a bit to give more depth to the image by having something in the foreground. Thank you very much for the input! I don’t have much time unfortunately so I stopped trying to make this perfect (especially as the scene is very slow now), maybe will try some other light conditions and angles when I get to it.

Some “real” work came my way this week, so I’m moving this to the gallery right now! 🙂

Some info  this scene:

I used a sky-dome and liked how this worked. Unfortunately the 360 skies on cgtextures have been moved to cgskies where they removed the free commercial use even on the low-res samples, this is one image I had downloaded from them some time ago when they were free to use commercially. I am considering to go buy some hires ones.

This is my scene, a small pool, don’t know if there’s any fish in it 🙂

I tried this doughnut shaped landscape as I wanted it to make a real 3d world around my project together with the skydome, so I’ll be able to change camera and get nice reflections when I’ll render a day time image. Not necessarily the best way to go about it but seemed to work OK here.

I used layers and “this layer only” lights to organise the scene. I was hoping this will shorten the render load and make handling lights easier. While building the house I used the solidify modifier and its function for putting different materials on the new faces, this way I could easily separate the interior faces into a new mesh on it’s own layer and lights. I also used a separate sun for the trees on their layer, as the one that looked good on the house didn’t look good enough on the trees. So it got a bit complicated. I so wish Blender layers could be named!

At first I tried to use linked scenes, I wanted to make the base scene, then have a new scene inside the same file with the dusk setup, another with day setup. I got badly entangled in this system, and took Blender ages to come back to life after one scene change. Maybe it was because of the trees. In the end put all in one scene. I’ll try some other time with linked files, see if that works better. It also took too much to save the rendered file after rendering. I think I didn’t use instancing enough on the trees, I’ll take more care with this next time.

I used some trees and reeds and rocks from the Nature Academy pack and some made by me. I had to set display mode to bounding box on most of the trees so I can work, only this way it’s a bit difficult to position them properly. After I rendered the “last time” I noticed some gaps where a not so nice part of the background was visible, so I just cloned some tree in there in Gimp!

The Gimp post processing consisted of a bit of color curves to enhance the dawn red, some contrast and just a bit of glow.