not bad man.... but it looks like a light is on in the thing there.... might be me....

The model is great,and the textures too,but the scene needs some touches.Good job anyway!

Wonderful idea and model! .. I just heard about Shag Hair, what an original use of that plugin :-)

I dont like the sky. Looks to artificial to me. The model is very good and I like the textures, but the windows are either too reflective, or I agree that there seems to be light on inside. The cracked dry earth also doesnt fit well with the green grass. Add more grass in different browns to get a better look, or make the green grass brown.

thanks :) yeah I couldn't figure out yet why the windows are doing that, they're not reflective, they don't have any specular props, and there isn't a light inside, but for some reason they keep rendering like that... I even put a dark diffuse map over them... The ground is actually gravel, altho I know that most of the gravel would be sunken in by now, so I'll prolly just get rid of the gravel as it is and just use SCATTER with a rock for sporadic gravel... the sky is volume fog over a noisy gradient, mainly cuz I hate using photographic backgrounds... I got my render farm up last night, or render terarium in my case, so I'll add more grass to it and use a thicker hair so it's more visible... there's actually a yellow blade and a shorter green blade of grass... but thanks for the great comments, I'll update in a day or two :)

Wow! I really like the caboose model and the way you arranged the scene. Instead of fighting the window light problem, why not use it to your advantage? I can visualize it in scene under a cloudy night sky surrounded by dead earth and sparse foliage (with some gravel under the tracks though of course). In place of the of hillside you could have an old, one-room, train station ... and hanging from it's porch rafter could be a miner's lantern housing a dimly lit flame. That would look friggin' spooky with the windows of the caboose! ... and hey?! What's wrong with using a photograph of a night sky to use with the background? It would look a hella lot better than a crappy gradient map. What do you think they use in movies? It's either a digital painting or a photograph ... I mean come-on! Shrek would've looked real good with gradient maps (pttt!). If you want a night sky that's been done by hand then just ask, I'll let you use one I've made.

actually, it's not a night sky, it was s'pose to look slightly overcast... besides, I like using procedural maps as often as I can, fortunately my procedural mapping skills have improved greatly since then... :P