That is beautiful to look at. It must be in the next “Art of Blender” book.
Outstanding…
Awesome stuff!
Love it.
Might be the best nature render I’ve seen and one of the best regardless of category.
Fantastic work ! 
I love the realism of the nature and the mood.
Would you share your leaf Material ?
Kind regards
Alain
Awesomely awesome, unbelievable. This belongs in someone’s game and or movie. So beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
wonderful images, thanks for sharing.
HOLY SMOKES! Really incredible work.
WOW really amazing!!!
Thanks for the kind words guys!
@Alain: Well the node system for the leaves in that scene is pretty convoluted right now, but it’s basics are pretty simple. I started off with these texture maps:
Just an aspen leaf that I tossed in the scanner. Not making an aspen, but this is CG: I do what I want!
The surface nodes are simple diffuse node added to a translucent node and a glossy node. The top map is used for the diffuse node and the translucent node which gets its hue adjusted with a little more yellow. The intensity of the translucent node is controlled by the bottom two maps. The glossy node is used for the waxiness of the leaf. Finally the bottom two maps are also used with displace output after being inverted.
Here is another shot (excuse the noise):
In the scene I had a few extra vertex colors controlling different things on the material and the edge of the leaf was crinkled a bit with a displace modifier, which is why I did not use the alpha of the texture maps. If you want me to, I can whip up a blend file showing the basic setup.
Gorgeous and convincing.
Amazing! Really beatiful work - congrats on well deserved top row! I looked for quite a long time and did not even think to look for any fault - remaining engaged like that is one sign of excellent work in my opinion. I was going to start listing all the things that I thought were done well, but I would have just been listing everything there anyway, so not much point 
I would be interested to hear some more about your painted textures for the rocks. Did you use a dirty vertex map to add the lichen?
pretty amazing :yes:
Increible!!
Beautiful. Nice idea, and I really like what you did with the lighting.
Purely stunning work.
I’d love to see a tutorial on this explaining how you created such complex realistic models and then how you managed them when you rendered them (eg how you mentioned using certain cores etc).
I’ve always struggled with organic models and making them look realistic (not plastic), so any help would be greatly appreciated!!!
Thanks once again for sharing!
The finished product is awesome. And I am also grateful that you shared the screenshot. It kind of give the work behind the finished renders more meaning for me.
But no doubt, the finished work is fantastic.
Excellent. That’s the kind of work that keeps me going with my stuff. Thanks for the inspirado
@Blender Matt: I used a good number of vertex colors and weights as well as the normal direction to control where certain texturing came through. Dirty vertex colors was one of the masks. Generally I stick to vertex weights as masks unless I use each channel of a vertex color independently as a mask and need to restrict the mask to face loops. The center isle had around 455k triangles from dynatopo (which was fast and responsive), but brush strokes with vertex paint and weight paint were horribly, horribly slow. There was no modifiers, no masking, no wireframe overlay, or anything I could think of that would cause it to be that slow. I was able to weight paint the carved steps, but after that, I just used automated tools. I used these 3 textures on the cliff along with hue/saturation adjustment and other color manipulation with various vertex masks:
@mano-wii: Well the Blend file is 822 MB and the textures folder is 239 MB. My Internet upload rate is labeled as half of my download rate of 1.5 Mb/s, but as many of you know, whatever the ISP says, it’s generally slower. Aside from various other reasons for uploading, I just don’t like having to deal with uploading large files, much less making an account on a place where I could upload a file that big.
@pancreasboy: I thought about making tutorials sometime in the future, but right now I just don’t have the time. If you need to specify thread usage just go to the performance tab under render settings and change threads from “auto-detect” to “fixed” and specify a number of threads. In my case I have a hex-core with 2 hardware threads per core, so I specified 10 threads, thus the CPU usage remained at about 83.3% the during rendering. Making stuff not look like plastic is generally easy: never use glossy/specular where it’s not needed and proper control of its roughness/intensity when it is needed. Way back when using Blender’s legacy renderer (that’s what I call blender internal, which I think should be renamed from “Blender Render” to “Legacy Render” in the render engine menu) I always turned the specular intensity slider all the way down, since at its default settings everything looked like plastic.