Thank you guys every post sounds helpful and I will try harder. As said that example is just a default terrain/material in Vue just to start. I only softened the sun shadows 20% because I don't like hard shadows.

What concerns me though is that I can't seem to find hyper-realistic renders of Vue anywhere! They all look like illustrations, while what I am trying to do is to make "photographs". To a lesser extent, this is also quite true of Terragen, except that guy's work (I don't think it's TG2 because the images are quite old).

I will give Geocontrol a thought. I visited the website but couldn't understand what that program really does. It is quite ironic that having the supposed most realistic scenery program on the market (Vue) one has to invest in another software - while the best landscapes I've seen have been done with a freeware-ish!