Here's the final piece, minor touching up (blur to remove grainy clouds, color adjusts, etc.) done in photoshop. Wouldn't believe the settings I used to try to remove the grain from the clouds, and with no success.
Comments and crits are welcome.
I like your dedication to this and the entire picture (clouds, atmosphere, setting, colors, lighting) is well done. My only problem is that the sharpness of your wave crests is unrealistic. I played with this a lot when trying to create a realistic ocean and never came to a satisfying result. Hence, I left mine without those crashing waves.
Don't just quit, though. Maybe we'll discover more ways to functionalize these waves.
This really was only a test. I made no tweaks to it, I slapped a twist and sheared power-fractal onto a water shader, and that's all the effort I put into it.
I may someday come back to it, but at the moment water bores me.
After seeing Digital Domain's use of water in the movie I can't remember that had great special effects (New York City gets deluged in water), I'm determined there must be a way to make realistic water. My ocean TGC is a whimper of what it could be.
Dude, that's cool... REALLY cool! It almost reminds me of... was it Chrono Cross? In the area that's all frozen in time...
Personally, I think that if you just touched up some of the white grain in the water like you said it'd be perfect. All the colors work really well together...