Verdant Shore

[ares2101]

This started as an experiment with creating wet shorelines and just sort of took off from there.

[Henry Blewer]

If you reduced the wave scale this would look better. The camera is very close to the water's surface. This makes the scales appear larger.

This is a good start. Did you use a reflective shader for the wet shore? I have used the lambert shader before for this. The lambert shader does not require as much CPU to render. It's hard to blend it in so it looks right though.

[ares2101]

If you reduced the wave scale this would look better. The camera is very close to the water's surface. This makes the scales appear larger.

This is a good start. Did you use a reflective shader for the wet shore? I have used the lambert shader before for this. The lambert shader does not require as much CPU to render. It's hard to blend it in so it looks right though.

Yes, I used a reflective shader and a color one with gamma turned down to create the dark and shiny look, I found that tip in a thread on the forum.  I've never used a lambert shader, is it meant to do stuff like this?

I kind of like how the water looks, it gives the impression of waves being normal, which fits with the height I put on the wet layer.

[Henry Blewer]

The problem with the waves is they have a sinusoidal look; not enough variation. Using a smaller wave scale would be an easy fix.

The lambert shader kind of merges the colors together, and darkens them. At least it did when I used it. That was quite some time ago.

[ares2101]

Somehow my nodes got screwed up, so I will use this advice for future images and leave this one as is. 

[dandelO]

The Lambert shader adds a fake translucency effect to a surface, you can plug a shader into it, select 'use original colour' to then apply translucency to whatever the input node is. It also works as a child layer to a surface, while retaining the original colour of the parent layer too. it won't make it reflective but is good if used in combination with reflectivity, to make ice, or other semi opaque translucent crystals, perhaps.
To take away lots of render time from reflective shader rendering, uncheck 'ray traced reflections' in the shader's settings, this will result in a plain, specular highlight only type surface and it won't actually 'mirror' other parts of the scene in the reflectivity, this makes for a much faster to render reflectivity.