Awesome Render! You pulled this off very well. I really like the way the forest feels endless as well. Really great work.
glad to see, that others are aware of this. same goes for vignetting and chromatic aberration. often there is more of that and less actual content.
@OP: I like it very much. tried grass once, medium results, very annoying :D. What you have conjured is amazing! I cant find anything to add to previous criticizms.
Wow. That is just incredible. It is really difficult to make cg grass looks that good. The trees also add greatly to the nature ‘fresh’ mood. Really beautiful.
@seanser the modeling is mine- as much as using sapling is ‘modeling’ but I used texture from some trees I found online… I suspect you’re right. I’m away from my computer right now but when I get home I’ll find out and give full credit. I should have done this to begin with. 
Looks pretty good.
I am in the progress of modeling grass using the particle system.
I will use this as reference.
Thanks for sharing 
Overall, nice rendering. A couple notes from a nature buff:
you have dandelions both flowering and in seed, which are two different stages of the plants life. there can be a bit of overlap (perhaps some in the shadows are still flowering, but most of the ones in the direct sun are seeding out), or adding more variety in the stages of the plants would help too (just starting to bloom, flowerhead closing up, seed head opening up, maybe a seed head that has had some of the achenes blown away).
The grass is pretty short, but still diverse enough to look somewhat “wild”. A thicket like that would have much taller grass.
Birch trees tend to grow in moist areas, like the banks of a creek. maybe add the impression of a creek in the middle distance, with some of the additional foliage mentioned earlier.
It’s a very well executed image, but a few content tweaks could really drive it home. I see these sort of things a lot in nature renders, and they stick out to me. I know it’s a bit nitpicky, but a realistic image of nature that doesn’t look like real nature is only going to impress people who don’t go outside much 
.
Krzysztof Czerwiński IS the originator of the textures of these birch trees, I am changing my original post to reflect this. Sometimes we are so proud of our work that we want to take all the credit, even though others have helped. For that omission I am truly sorry.
Thanks to seanser for bringing this up btw. The worst thing to me is not getting credit for helping with someone else’s work and now here I am - doing the same thing!!
@seanser the modeling is mine- as much as using sapling is ‘modeling’ but I used texture from some trees I found online
It’s very easily done and has happened to me unwittingly in the past. It’s just that I was using that guy’s tree set recently and the bark textures jumped out at me. Regardless, it’s a very nice render!
Re: the actual render (got distracted by the DOF thing), a few points have already been made such as the propensity of birch to be near water, I would just add that maybe you’ll want to check the normal density of birch trees, as the scattering of these feels more like it was done for composition. Also maybe look at the clumping around tree bases and elsewhere in these kinds of scenes especially if this is not supposed to be a manicured lawn. I like it a lot overall though.
If I’m honest, the plantlife on the ground looks too even and dense for me. The grass around tress is usually quite scarce in the summer, because the tress will block the light out and draw water from the soil around them.
However, that being said, I absolutely love both the tree branch texture and the leaf material you made. c:
@guitartom47 — it’s nothing, just MHO. I like saturated colors so much. Yes, it’s really me(about mug). I just wanted create something like that and add hipsta-style Thanx,btw)
I don’t follow. Why is that generic? The golden mean/ratio/rule of thirds is like the de facto of the art world if not de jure. To be honest, I like your cropping much better. Maybe because it is “rule of thirds ey.” To be fair, I’m not an aesthetics king but I know a few tricks :).
Very impressive; deserves to be featured.
The only thing that bothers me is the tree trunks, they look too uniform, even though the texturing is varied; of course, a copse or wood planted at the same time would look similar, but real-life doesn’t have to strive to look real: it simply is.
You know that the golden ratio and the rules of thirds are completely different things, right?
Cool, thumb up
Kind regards
Alain
For me everything is too uniform. Trees, grass, meadow… Looks like all trees are the same, have the same size, grass is identical all over the place with the same size, height… etc. Good start but for me at this point does not look very realistic.
@ntnsftr - so if you were doing this project you would have continued further and with more detail? I understand. I’ve seen your work. It’s INCREDIBLE. I have no doubt you could do this better. I decided it was done. I did vary the height of the trees by about 30%. The grass is the way I wanted it…though in the back of my mind I thought I should put more thickness under the trees. I’ve never played with dandelions before or put in the seedy grass. I learned how to make better trees by studying someone else’s. For ME that was an innovation. I discovered a few things on my journey to making better renders. I’ve been doing this for a little over a year now and I’m a little slow. Next one will be better, as this one was better than the last. Really I have no idea why this image got sent to the top, but I do appreciate that one or two like it.
As to how things don’t look very real, in a large way this is my childhood. thick yard covered with the most dandelions on the block. Mowing? Not when we could do other things. Lots of birches. though ours were more cream colored. It may be idealized, but there it is.
Super nice Result! I’ve tried similar things but I never got close to this 
Your render turned out quite good. It looks like it could have been made in Vue. I know that an artists does not want to give up his secrets, but I figure that I’d ask you anyway. Would it be possible for you to post the node group you used for the leaves? I am having a problem with translucency and realism and am currently being forced to use SSS instead.
When I use translucency, I end up getting a render that looks like @islara1 when the trees are small and far away. Using SSS instead seems to fix this, but I would like to know whether or not you have managed to get your results with a translucency based shader. If not, that’s cool I understand. But I will just ask anyway. :rolleyes: