Trying some new techniques

Did a lot of experimenting since I was not happy with a lot of the elements in my scene. Decided to go with a HDR image based lighting as a base light and did a directional and a bounce light. Tried out fur grass and the first results are not bad, learned how to tweak it a bit but I don't have any renders of the newest version. Also learned about z-depth and using it in photoshop to achieve depth of field and distance fog with out having to increase my render times. Some of those results are in the pic. A friend of mine ran a water simulation using real flow which we exported as a mesh and adjusted in zbrush. I think it really feels like the water is interacting with the environment.(not in this pic). And I was able to get a hold of Crazy bump for a while and ran all my textures through them, the normals are vastly better than those I made with the Nvidia plug-in. I don't have renders of the most current scene because the comps at school can not handle the file, They run out of memory when trying to render. So I'm rendering at a friends house because he has a awesome comp, You'll see what I mean in class.