After seeing orbital's tutorial on using photograph skies, I tried it and realized that putting 2D Picture squares in Bryce way back in the scene was much easier to coordinate without Photoshop, so this was my attempt at creating an image in orbital's style. Yep, that's about it. Well anyway, I was wondering what's missing. I mean, the final version will be rendered under premium quality and with a fair amount of DOF focused on the blimp. Is it the textures? I'm not sure exactly what it is but something about this image is just not right or finished to me; maybe I should add more of those strange buildings or something? Volumetrics might be the key, but where? Wow, actually can't remember the last time I had this much time with just the composition of an image. Can you guys help me out? ~Ben

Your text seems to be sharp and in focus. I don't see the problem with the black texture. That gray background seems a little strange. Why not use white? Your paragraphs seem to be well structured, but what's with the squiggly thing in front of your name? Oh wait! That's not the picture! My bad!

wip here

Your lightsource in the sky background is coming from the opposite direction to your buildings and blimp. You can probably get away with this. You have orange skies but your object light is fairly white. Try oranging up your sun and darkening or blueing up your default ambient settings in the skylab. Use more contrast.

any better? changed the lighting a bit, but rather than using a huge contrast change I just changed the volumetrics a bit and then used a little contrast. The new lighting really affected the scene I think.

I would use regular sunlight or pull your radial lights back a bit and use soft shadows though this will add to the render times. I'm seeing some harsh shadows and also a bright spot on the front building. I like the first sky a little better. What you can do is add more of your photo image to the ambient channel of the background. Here is sort of a duplicate of your setup. The first image is 100% diffusion 0% ambience on the sky image.

Here's the second image. The only change is the sky image is 0% diffuse 100% ambient. Somewhere in between will preserve the blues and softness in your image but still make it look like its part of the same scene.