GeroblueJim - 12 December 2012 05:20 PM
More realistic islands, with a beach along one side, flat areas. Maybe some buildings later on. As for the rocks, birds could live out there, or some ruins with birds.
More of a side view showing the sky. I can change the sky, I just clicked sky view and took the one it gave. I think a bluer ocean and a night sky with moonlight would look better. What do you think ?
(Signing off for sleep, I get up about 2 hours after midnight and head for work.)
Welcome GeroblueJim.
It’s a good starting point, but the first thing I would do would be to create a viewpoint and composition that showed off the depth of the scene.
Think about foreground, mid ground and background and try to get the elements to overlap each other, this will further increase the illusion of depth.
In the render below, I’ve tried to keep the elements the same as the ones you’ve used, but you’ll notice I’ve got the camera much lower so that the islands are overlapping the horizon line breaking it up and that the foreground island is most definitely in front of the background island.
I’ve then further added to the depth and illusion of distance by increasing the thickness and density of the haze (in the sky lab).
Other things I’ve done to tweak the basic materials are to try and make sure that the geology matches, so both islands are covered in the same basic material and the two rocks are a similar colour to the rock showing through on the islands.
Don’t be fooled into thinking Clam Waters are actually calm, usually I have found they produce much better reflections and tweaking the frequency will allow you to lose the almost grid-like uniform appearance of the waves. In my render I’ve used Calm Water; Deep Sea.
Finally, to make the beach, I duplicated the terrain and flattened it out, dropped it down to ground level and gave it the standard ‘Bright Beach Sand’ material which you’ll find in Terrains in the Plains sub category in the material library.
Hope this helps as a starting point for you to produce a landscape you will then be ready to start populating with buildings, birds and maybe some ships. 
PS: You really should take advantage of the free Bryce Pro 7 download though as it’s capabilities are much better and the extra content supplied by our very own David Brinnen will help you to achieve more realistic materials in your islands.
Click thumbnail to see full-size image
