This is was my first render test with VRay last week.
looks cool but you know everyones going to comment on the tileing of the road material. i find in cases of large expances of surface like that it might be better to paint one yourself in photoshop
Thanks for the input Da_elf.
I’ve been working on that road. First I tried making a massive image of this entire neighborhood with the road texture image copied scaled, rotated and blended in photoshop, but that slowed the render down too much. I haven’t been able to match the realism of a photo yet mixing noise maps, so now I’m wrestling with a smaller version of my road image stratigically uv mapping my road.
I’m working on a night time scene now. I’m fighting the disco light type splotches with IR. Hopefully, with the help of this forums posts I’ll have some decent animation by Monday.
looks quite good… although i think the plants are ruining it. Especially in the first render, they dont match the lighting at all.
And in the night time render they are better.. but still could be better still.
First I would like to say how happy I am to be finally posting in this forum, which seems to be custom made for me at this particular twist in my carear.
It’s good to get real criticism from those whom I respect. It pushes me harder, as I feel like an island in this relatively boring architectural firm.
Ya, the plants do sort of stand out, lighting wise, but I’m just using image maps from a limited library, no RPC, or 3D. Most tweeks that I tried in Photoshop seemed to just make them look worse. Perhaps I’ll try retouching them again.
I’ve redone the road today. I’ll post changes later.
have a look here for some tree models 
I’ve updated the links to my pictures incase anyone couldn’t see them before. Hopefully this is now the correct way to show images here.
Thanks for the link jow. I’m checking those trees out now. I’ve steered clear of Xfrog before because I remember reading somewhere that opacity maps were use extensively, which would drasticaly slow down VRay.
I’ve posted a script to change these in the general forum so if all of the xfrog leaves have the same material id, you can model a geometry leaf and use the script to replace your opacity mapped leaves with geometry ones based on material id.
I saw that a few days ago joconnell, but forgot about it till now. This should be very helpfull! I just did a quick render test of an opacity mapped tree and it took 9 min. With no opacity mapped leaves it rendered in 17 seconds, so your script will really help.