The image looks weird because everything is in focus, the butterfly is meant to be close whilst further away everything else is still crystal clear. Use some blurring either in the foregound whith the butterfy, or the background. If you can't be bothered to use too many bumps try in post rendering to put some grain effects on the trees, and grass, it will make them more textured. Oh and like Allerereureure* said, unless they're vampires, reflections would help. Cool pic though, I haven't done better with a 3D program yet. I really like the waterfall spray part.

okay, you're a lazy bum. oh!! you mean on the picture...! ;) (sorry, just kidding!) it looks pretty good. in fact, how DID you make that waterfall? and what is that... swoosh shape in the left background? your trees would look better if you ditch the cylinder and use a freeform extrusion. and dont use a round cross section for that, either, draw one with the pen, kinda round, but irregular. then kink the extrusion path a bit... and you could even shrink down the top cross sections to taper them, but they look okay untapered, now. after you duplicate and shade and size a bunch of 'em, and rotate them a bit so they 'kink' in different directions, you can also jump into one or two, create a new master, and give them new kinks. you might also vary the shader colours on some. you could even shrink some and stick them on the trunks as branches. not sure how to help with water in ray dream.... try out the various water shaders that come with it, and maybe a woodgrain or marble effect in the bump channel for some turbulence/flow. also, did you open your pz3 file in ray dream, or paste the people on in post render? you can import them and get their reflection. (oh, but... i think you have to save each one separately, because i havent figured out how to put individual texture maps on EACH figure of a multi-figure scene. :/ )

Ok, you need to use a water plane with a wave bump. Water with a waterfall would not be glassy. Try the blurring thing daemon sin suggested. Just "dirtying" it up a bit would be good. But for a first, I'd say you definitely had a future. Don't give up. It takes awhile. experiment...Experiment...EXPERIMENT!!

Thank you all so much for the ideas and letting me know I don't suck. I didn't really like the final outcome of this picture, but couldn't figure out exactly why. I know how to do all the suggestions except one. Everytime I bring people from Poser to RayDream there bodies are mangled. Like a woman's leg would be sticking out of her skull. I've cross examined both manuals and am pretty sure I'm doing it right? Did you ever experience anything like that?? The tree idea sounds cool bloodsong! I think that's why kind of bothers me the most. I wanted it to be surreal looking, so If I do funky branches that might help the look i'm trying for....

heya; in fact, last week i imported two poser scenes into ray dream. one came in perfectly fine. the other one came in with one finger. no matter what i did with it... :: i had to save that figure as an obj from poser to get it into the scene. i'm not sure why. i have ray dream 5.0.2 and p4.... i suspect the translation filter isn't 100% compatible. :/

I have the same 5.0.2 and p4. Strange things happen with those two ;P