Beach Sunset

[ghotir]

Just a quick test of some sunset ideas I was playing with.  C&C welcome

[Henry Blewer]

The sky is very good. The foreground needs a bit more lighting to make the plants pop. Try adding a second point light in line with the sun in the image. Put it where it can illuminate the foreground, but not affect the water.

The only other suggestion which comes to mid is the waves of the water. You can use the render camera with a distance shader to smooth the water surface nearest the shore. Set the distance shader to spherical for this. I think the distant waves are fine.

[ghotir]

Not sure I understand what you want me to do with the water.  I haven't messed with the distance shaders and I'm not sure how to plug it into the water and stuff.  Can you give me more info?

[Henry Blewer]

Here's is the setup. I set the wave info of the water shader to zero for roughness, wave scale, and smallest scale. I added a power fractal set to ridged noise with 6.25 for the scale and displacement. The distance shader is added to the Blend by input of the power fractal. The render camera is the center location of the spherical influence of of the distance shader. I then just did some quick renders to set the distance; 10000+ may be a little far...