Hey sil you're dragon has come so far! How bout going into perspective view, find a nice angle and hit the F key (with the dragon selected) to frame the dragon then open up render globals and set "Anti aliasing" quality to "production" and render out a decent image. Sometimes you are posting 800x600 or larger images with lots of space around the edges with no dragon in it. The sys-admins have asked repeatedly for people to post in 640x480 size images. I don't see the harm in posting an 800x600 from time to time as long as you show some actual detail. Don't be afraid to take the render into photoshop and crop out ALL empty space (even if it doesn't retain its original aspect ratio, thats not important). As you'll notice the guys that have been doing this for a while try to live be these few (and not very strict) rules, it makes everything more pretty and clean, and just nice to look at, plus it keeps the admins happy.

Ah sorry for all that, but i'd really like to see a nice up close picture with the production AA so we could give you're dragon texture one last crit before you go off on the enviroment.:bgreen:

If you were thinking about using bryce at all, i would suggest just using bryces render engine as the procedurals are pretty cool, and bryce is actually pretty good at naturally occuring enviroments. Then when you render out you're dragon, put a plane beneath him at a similar angle to the desired composite point in you're bryce image. For the shader on that plane try "USE BACKGROUND". This shader is for rendering shadows for compositing, and the plane will not render, just the shadow on it. Then in the render globals render out to transparent .TGA files (yes its photoshop compatible).
Now take you're bryce bg, you're dragon .tga with transparency and shadow, take em into photoshop and its pretty easy from there. They will probably look a little off, so try an "adjust> brightness and contrast" On the dragon layer to match it to the background.

HAVE FUN and good luck with you're enviromenting.