turning pfx into realistic poly plants

First 2 renders of my plants, these are paint effects that have then been converted into polygons so they can be rendered using Mental Ray, the problem is the plants use a phong for there textures so they look very flat and not very realistic

This is the same as above but has Ray Tracing turned on

 This is a few of the plants I concentrated on, in this render I have added a sun as a directional light and a ground plain in this render really shows how flat the phong is.

  In this render they now use a mia x material on the leafs and stems, this instantly looks a lot better and and has given a lot more depth to the scene.

 here I changed the camera in the Hypergraph connector to give me more settings and setting I understand more, This is before I changed the f stop so its a little darker

In this render I added a gamma correct in the Hypergraph to help with how washed out and desaturated the plants were

In these last 2 i changes how reflective and translucent the leafs were to help make it react to light in a realistic way these last 2 look a lot more realist than the ones above where i had only added a light, it took a very long time and had to get comfortable in the Hypergraph and the different ways to connect items. now i need to do the same as above but to all the plants then the same to the trees and lastly learn how to do it to grass that way i have a material library for when i start to assemble my scene and can just transfer the material onto each item.