St Mary Lake - V7

[Gannaingh]

I think I'm getting closer to finalizing this one.  I spent a lot of time on the water trying to simulate the wind's effects on the water and I've achieved some decent results. Unfortunately the current method, multiple water shaders, is a render time hog so I'm going to replicate the appearance with some default shaders/surface layers.

[Clay]

Nicely done!

[Oshyan]

Beautiful. I think maybe just desaturate and/or darken the conifers a tad?

Also, are you not using a Water Shader (and thus unable to use the Wind Patch effect)?

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Also for others: if you disable reflection and transparency you can stack water shaders as children of surface layers and mask these by multiple PF's for variation of the waves, or add PF's as waves, and/or stretch certain waves by hauling through transform shader. Then finally use a reflective shader (in this case), but you already do that I believe.
I like this water, but a tad more wind diversity might be nice.

[Gannaingh]

Oshyan, I'm using a pair of merged water shaders to get the differentiated blue and reflective water. I tried getting the desired effect with the water shader's wind patch effect, but I wasn't satisfied with the result so I switched to the merged water shaders. However, that turned out to be quite slow so I'm now using pretty much exactly the methodology that Dune has described

[RArcher]

This has really come along nicely.  I like the foreground trees in theory, but the lower quality models are really distracting from the realism of the rest of the image.

[Cocateho]

This is very nice! Two suggestions. Some high cirrus clouds  and  some wildflowers in the field in front and also on the right side in the distance to add some color/ interest/detail on a small scale as well as overall. Beautiful though 

[Tangled-Universe]

This is very nice! Two suggestions. Some high cirrus clouds  and  some wildflowers in the field in front and also on the right side in the distance to add some color/ interest/detail on a small scale as well as overall. Beautiful though 

I disagree on the addition of clouds.
In my opinion many scenes are easily "over-stuffed" with features.
Personally I like it better when a rich detailed surface, also with wildflowers and such, is best balanced with a clear and rather "empty" sky.

[DocCharly65]

I agree with Tangled-Universe.

I like it as it is
(subject slightly reduced saturation) 

[Kadri]

Looks like a photo

[Gannaingh]

Thank you, all, for the comments and suggestions!

[otakar]

Well done! Agree about the water, less uniformity would be an improvement.

[WAS]

Wow fantastic! And what forest pack is that? The trees look insanely detailed.

[Gannaingh]

WASasquatch, the trees are from X-frog's USA Conifers pack.

[Gannaingh]

At long last I have an update. It was almost finished before I had to leave to go camping, but not quite. I added some wildflowers to the foreground shore, but they're difficult to see since that area is bushy more than just covered in grass. I also spent a good deal of time refining the water surface and I think it has a much better balance between the wind swept areas and the calmer water. I think I might be just about done with this one besides rendering it larger.