Sorry, but every part of a render matters. It's about overall look, and unfortunately whenever I looked at that render I was rather distracted by the shadows to be perfectly honest. Once I got past that however, it was rather nice. ;)

Also tapion, that's nice...when most people use lathe NURBS their first time they have issues with sections going inside eachother. (Or do you have that issue on bottom? If you do, just make sure the vertical dimensions of your object's first and last points are equal. Also, you should only be placing points on two planes...probably X/Z and Y.)

Also, I would recommend creating textures when possible rather than playing with preset shaders...it will give you valuable experience. (Though don't get me wrong, sometimes for certain parts shader manpulation is the way to go!)

Not true for tests hiding.
In a test it's just about what your testing, nothing else

Sorry, I know it's nitpicky...I'm just a perfectionist with that sorta thing...can't stand looking at my own work without all grounds covered, even if it's just a test.

Ok, ok, it's a piece of shit, happy? Stop going on about it already, I get the point.

God, chill. It looked good, I just critiqued one tiny part of it. And then I even followed up by saying not to take the comment seriously because im just being anal about it.

Stone marshes

wow foodeater, that's amazing! did you sculpt every stone by hand, or did you use a displace and subsurf modifiers?

that's wicked.

I used displace and subsurf. Actually, I used subsurf, displace, subsurf, and displace, in that order, in each stone.

nice, creates a very good stoney effect. btw, out of curiosity, is that actually a liquid physics thing on the ground or is that just a semi-transparent mesh?

Whats a good program i can render 3D with?