Don't make things in the distance too detailed, but pay close attention to what you put in the foreground. If there's grass or rocks make sure they're varied enough to look natural, a big problem with nature renders is that the trees, rocks, and grass all looks the same. Also pay close attention to your materials. Nothing makes a scene look fake like bad texturing.
I'm definitely having a lot of trouble with the textures. Somehow I can't find anything above 4K, which doesn't seem to be nearly enough resolution. Am I focusing on the wrong thing?
4k is kinda overkill unless you plan on making this thing a billboard. You should focus mostly on procedurally generated PBR materials first, image maps are useful in a lot of cases but most of the time you can pull things off with shaders. You'll also need a good base PBR material to apply your maps to.
You should be careful about using a lot of high res image maps because that can bog down render time. Get by with the minimum resolution for the quality expected in the end result.
The easiest way to make a realistic landscape (if that's what you mean by 'highly detailed') is to use an actual landscape. You might want to look into BlenderGIS ([https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS](https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS)).
Don't make things in the distance too detailed, but pay close attention to what you put in the foreground. If there's grass or rocks make sure they're varied enough to look natural, a big problem with nature renders is that the trees, rocks, and grass all looks the same. Also pay close attention to your materials. Nothing makes a scene look fake like bad texturing.
I'm definitely having a lot of trouble with the textures. Somehow I can't find anything above 4K, which doesn't seem to be nearly enough resolution. Am I focusing on the wrong thing?
4k is kinda overkill unless you plan on making this thing a billboard. You should focus mostly on procedurally generated PBR materials first, image maps are useful in a lot of cases but most of the time you can pull things off with shaders. You'll also need a good base PBR material to apply your maps to. You should be careful about using a lot of high res image maps because that can bog down render time. Get by with the minimum resolution for the quality expected in the end result.
I agree with you. It's just that, I've been using 2K textures and the ground looks really blurry up close.
Do you have a render you can post?
The easiest way to make a realistic landscape (if that's what you mean by 'highly detailed') is to use an actual landscape. You might want to look into BlenderGIS ([https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS](https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS)).
I actually meant the materials and textures. I think BlenderGIS is great, but the textures don't hold up in close-up shots.