Hi guys. Thanks for the great feedback! I appreciate the comments.
I did not see that the grass changed height to the right of the steps. Really good eye abgrafx3d! Thanks. That's not a road in front, but a half-circle driveway, and yes, it would look better with a texture or expansion joints. There's actually a texture there, but it's too washed out. I could have spent more time on it. The roof texture was done with the tiles procedural in MAX and rendered to texture. I added some dirt to the roof in Photoshop with the burn tool just to give it some randomness (is that word?). The trees and grass were added in Photoshop. I used an eye-level photograph of a grassy area and cloned it in. I created a nice mask to make the cloning easier; I turned off the ground plane in MAX and rendered an alpha channel. This made adding the grass as simple as a large brush swipe. The only bad thing is that this method made my driveway look as if it were "above" the grass. I'll have to rethink it a bit. See the original image (below) - notice that the driveway rests below the grass surface - as if the grass were sodded.
Thanks again for the comments!
Jason
