Let's make the scene significantly heavier, shall we?

 Now that the grand majority of motion was set in place, I could turn my attention to the following problem on my 'to do list' - the boring environment. 

Sure, what I started with did suffice for what I was initially doing, and the animation would be alright if I left it the way it was. But since I had some time to spare, why not make it pop a little more and in turn indirectly improve the whole shot. Nothing too crazy so that it's not suddenly super distracting from the animation, but something that would perfectly fit the theme. It was then when my tutor revealed to me the ancient secret technique of Maya brushes.

These things looked very promising, so I decided to have some fun with them.
I decided to put some emphasis on the fact that this is indeed a field and not some yellow play-dough land. A few strands of yellowy grass did the trick. Funny how something so seemingly insignificant can so easily clarify it's a grassland we're looking at here.
I chose to also throw in something that could resemble a corn field over to the right of the frame.
With those strands in place, the three blobby trees in the background stood out like a sore thumb. I decided to replace them with some slightly higher poly trees.

This was also the time I did the first renders of my project, which revealed a lot of interesting flaws about my animation. Some shaders were completely wrong, like the reflectivity on the horse and the grass. Meanwhile the guy's shirt was never supposed to be this colorful, it turned out it was a visual glitch with texture variants.
Some of these issues I found... puzzling... to say the least. I was ready to bite the bullet and ignore them. I even rendered out a plan B version of my project in case I wasn't able to fix them.
Luckily I managed to take care of them, with a lot of time until the deadline as well. :D