Building the swamp environment

I've begun building the environment and am hopefully not too far from finishing it also. 

I made a diffuse and spectacular map for the dirt, so I'm quite impressed with the texture and how realistic looking it is!

I have a flat plane for the water at the moment. I put an ocean shader on it and did a render (didn't save it, sorry) just to experiment and that looked good. I would need to play with the colours and reflectivity to get a more swamp like looking water. 

I have been using paint effects and converting them to polygons to get some of the shrubs, mushrooms, vines, trees, flowers and grasses. I'm not sure if I will put turbulence on them to make them blow in the wind yet as I know that can really slow down rendering time and I'm not sure how easily I can test it. I'm also using Vray Fur for grass on the terrain. Still want to experiment with that. I have put a sky dome on it with a dull looking sky colour as I feel that matches the swamp well. I'm going to experiment with using a fluid box in the skydome and using matte paintings of trees on the flat planes in the background. I also want to put fog in the scene but this may slow down render time so will take some experimentation. 

Next steps:

• Fluid box for animated clouds
• Shade water
• Matte paintings of trees in background
• Fog
• Turbulence on plants and grasses (wind)
• Lighting
• Test character in the scene

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/fog_density/fog_density.html

 - Fog tutorial.