Quote from: Dune on November 03, 2016, 11:14:45 AM
Well, you got the beach, don't you. I would just add some luminosity in a surface shader masked by the first few waves, perhaps masked by some PF for variation, some tiny PF (or tiny fake stone with no displacement as mask) as a base for shiny (reflective, or just more luminosity) pinpoints of light.
So here's a first attempt. It doesn't look much like the Maldives image, but that was just a pre-thought at what I'm presently aiming for.
A touch of backstory: I have this book series that I've been working on since 1979. I am finally starting serious work on the fourth and final book (if only because the emails from readers more or less shouting FINISH THIS SERIES BEFORE YOU DIE are starting to get annoyingly frequent. Or frequently annoying. Or both). The series includes a description of an afterlife or pre-afterlife experience described as "the Last Shore": it's a sea of light. I saw the Maldives image and thought "Hmm, that's a first step in that direction..."
I'm getting the new website for the series ready and realized I have no imagery to represent the last book (
The Door Into Starlight). And needed some. So immediately my thoughts turned to Terragen. The book's final cover may not feature this imagery, but that's a different issue, for much later.
Anyway: a first attempt. To get it perfect is going to take much tweaking of the separate luminosity layers until the wave structure, even with the very counterintuitive lighting, looks right. But something like this (layered into a Daz3D foreground, because I need a doorway to be looking at this view through) will hold the space on the website for the moment...
--DD
