3D background start - proof of concept

The song references "on a summer desert night", this is literally a work in progress desert scene to create a viable background for our music video, created with Modo using textures projected from a panorama which I found, and gained permission to use. The mountains are literally those on the left of the panorama.
This was rendered far too dark, with no real lights but using just the moon image and a starfield. Which meant I just increased the brightness in Photoshop for this picture to make it far brighter however in the future I can easily increase the brightness by simply changing the gamma value.

This is the current Wireframe, the sand, the original grassy heath which I will recreate at a later date and than the mountains in the background.

The moon and visible stars are both billboards placed behind the mountains as you can see by the two squares behind the mountain. There is a 3rd starfield in a sphere encircling the entire scene however it deforms the image and therfore visibly I replaced it. It however does light the scene. The moons and stars are currently the only light sources in this scene which drives up render times.
I will make heavy use of procedural textures as, my first attempt at sand is visible on the left, it is literally two bump layers (an illusion of depth) layed on top of each other to show both the graininess of sand and also the random variation of the surface of the sand.
Therefore the first layer to allow graininess is at a far higher resolution and set to add over the second layer which gives the sand shape.
It also has a base colour which has another layer of noise to multiply onto it to give it some variation.

It consists of no image map but is purely computer generated. I will use this technique where possible to limit the amount I need to gather.