Here's a night version with a candle and stars. Interestingly enough this demonstrates a bug in Maya 7, where geometry is not sorted properly in depth when paint effects are rendered behind a small object. Notice how the candle dissappears when it goes infront of the birch paint effect trees. At first I thought this was because of a shader glow and light glow I had on the candle deformed flame body and point light but after taking off all glow- the candle body still gets occluded. I've have to render the candle separately and comp it over to fix this.
There were several things
There were several things wrong with the "oaktreeforest" in version 1.
1. Some of the trees were hovering off the ground.
2. They always faced camera.
So I replaced them with individual birch trees.
I also cut the number of leaves in half to show more branches.