T he problem is in your background photo: It has to be in the same perspective as tank. Now it is not, so you need better photo or picture of a tank from different angle. :) The size of that tank is little wrong (my opinion) And the shadow looks fake. You also might need some color correction.

The gun is my own design. Not any replica from real world. I am not so pleased about the material of handle, but i let it be, because its still ok.

kikkare

Caustics is one of most hardest thing to do with programs. You actually need a ray tracer render engine and few thousands of iterations (lot of power from your computer) to do that really good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_%28optics%29

Some old renders

You do really nice stuff. especially i am really impressed about these shattered text effects http://i.imgur.com/5L1azc2.jpg

Thank you about the comments :)

I am speaking about the basics of 3d-modeling that are not so hard to learn if you have motivation. It is very easy to do small scenes that looks really nice, but everything can also be done very hard ways. How accurate and realistic do you wanna be? Maybe you are trying to do something more pro that which i am using blender. Mostly i do only this kind of simple scenes like this one And then i use photoshop for making it better than what it looks like in tha picture. The result would be after PS something like this: Thats because in most of cases you dont have enought time to start unwrapping your model in blender and tweaking your nodes. And if you only need 1 render from 1 direction, why not to use photoshop? Animations are different case. Of course there are a lot of settings you can fix in camera and node editor (like dof) but you can do good render without adjusting any of them if you have an idea of what you are doing. Everything can be also faked with photoshop and if we wanna do nice picture, it does not matter by with method we did it. That "dreams" example picture i found from my hard drive, ive used only few nodes whom you can see from the above picture. The leaves has no texture, but it does not matter, because i would not show this picture in that big size in other places than i did here. Ive also used 3ds max and i might say that blender would be little bit harder to start using because blender has some features you just need to know. (by watching videos or reading forums) Max has more buttons for everything, so you can just keep pressing them, but blender uses more shortcuts.. Or smthng like that.

removed

Basic materials can be done very fastly. You just change the colors in the picture. Then if you dare, you can add some textures in photoshop. I could be done that with that deer. And if you want to be more professional in 3d-field, you can also learn UV-editing for the real textures. And rendering, it happens in blender just by pressing F12. Maybe the first things you learn. Positioning camera is the same, you can put the camera anywhere you want to as easily you poistion your objects. Lighting is the harder part. If you learn this basic light setup, you can actually create almost anything you want to What i am trying to tell, its that its not so hard that you might thing. Its just a new way of thinking. Youve learned a lot of harder things at your school. The real question is that "how much you want to learn new stuff?" You can start a new wordl in blender and thing "oh there is a buttons that i dont know. Too hard" and then destroy the world by closing blender. Or you can learn what the buttons mean and develope your world. You can also download some free models from here: http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/abrams-tank-17774.html or other sites like that and put then to your world.

I think its an impossible to embed flash objects on forum. :) Thats because someone would write a flash virus and embed it in here.

I was sure that i would not ever start topic like this, but here we go... :) Mostly i do 3d-modeling for fun, but at my daily job i use photoshop for web-design. Here is some of my models: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6u7hbrm14h55qb4/pistooli1_pieni.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/p1mcuaq7q0qp8mj/in_the_name.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6z6lw9097autvs/staying_still_low_sm1.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/fh6ribf5fjuvywu/orvo_the_lonely_alien.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/7pbg3ipf78wijkt/cactus.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/b5695amsm03qzm1/biplane3.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/cih0b0ae8t8auta/ravintola61.jpg

Again this conversation. so ill post my old link.

When i started using Blender, in about a 2 weeks i was able to do this deer and i was actually so lazy for learning, so you could do a lot better. Now after few years from thet deer, i can easily in few hours model stuff like these, and better if needed: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5904620/y/Pasilat%C3%B6it%C3%A4/carstuff.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5904620/html-testit/Portfolio/images/portfolio/3d-mallinnus/robottimallinnus/robotti1/lentorovotti18.jpg

Created one for fun