3D Summer Scene

For my June/Summer 3D scene I came up with the idea of having a bright, grassy island with a clear river running through a valley, with trees and a butterfly in the air.
To begin with I first created another hi-res 3000px by 3000px displace map of the shape of the landscape.
I created a plain with plenty of length and width ways segments, with a displace modifier and used the “strength” selection to create the landscape with a mesh smooth modifier on top.


I then created a second plain and placed it just above the base of the landscape. I used this plain as my water object.
To create the water material I scrolled down to the Maps selections and under reflection I chose the flat mirror option. This creates a good reflection surface for the water, but it is too still, so I applied a noise modifier under the bump map section with a size of around 10-15. This creates a realistic enough water surface.


I used the same tree objects from my Halloween scene for the trees in my summer scene. I made a sphere, cut it in half, caped the borders and used soft selection to organically manipulate the polygons into a tree shape. I cloned this tree object a few times and placed them around the island scene.
For my sky I again created a half sphere to place over the whole landscape with a sky texture placed along the inside of the sphere.
I placed a few Omni lights around the scene to try and achieve a bright summers feel to the landscape.
To finish off my summer image I created a butterfly.
For the body and head I created a cylinder and used the bevel tool to create a slim body shape for the butterfly and then placed a mesh smooth modifier on it. For the wings I imported an image of a butterfly into the background and traced the wing shapes with the line tool and extruded the shape out into 3D space.


I tried using UV mapping on the butterflys wings to create a realistic texture by unwrapping the object texture and exporting it out into Photoshop. I then imported the image back into the 3Dsmax and applied the texture to the wing of the butterfly. However I then had a few problems importing the butterfly with the textures into my island scene.
These are my final images for my Summer/June scene