how achieved: i created a pebble layer (alphacenturied inflated 3d-terrain-tool, basic zexture + alpha created via textured alphabrush), a reed layer (reed done with zspheres, one straight, a few bent, placed, markered, multimarker, make polymesh, off to texturing) and a sky layer (flatcolor-plane, quickly sprayed clouds and background vegetation). because i wanted some groundpebbles to shine through i decided to make use of refraction, which only works within one layer. so i merged the layers. ( :ex: always create copies of layers before merging - and also create copy of merged layer before placing refracted object, as this allows to go back and tweak materials which are beneath refractionized object… i didnt :rolleyes: ). then i placed a pretty flat (initialized at x+z 100, y about 8) low rgb-sphere with noise/de-smooth and such added, at the given angle refraction looked best at a very low level, about 2:
i didnt care too much that the underwater-reed was looking awful, as i thought that simplebrush dragrectangeling flipped texture-grabs of above-water-scenery for reflections could deal with them… which was a bad idea, as dragrectangeling within one layer turned out to be very difficult. a few leaves were added the deevee-snakehook-way with alpha-brush40, as the ones i had modelled with the reed-zsphere didnt look nice. i finally increased the environment settings in the waters material a bit and enabled environment-scene at field of view 90 in the render-palette:
at one point i had made a grab of the complete layer/canvas, now i turned that alpha into a stencil, inverted it and added some greens and details to the background. the stencil proved rather helpful with the paint-reflection-overkill i started afterwards, too: clone-brush, highlighter, contrastbrush at minimum rgb (1), smudge (with and without colour-blend), dragrectangeling with simple-brush and partial grabs. stencil or not, some parts turned out to be too difficult to paint within one layer:
the version on top was done, because a visitor asked me to do a less “cartoony” one. for this i made a reimported .psd into an alpha via “texture-make alpha”, made a texture from that greyscale-like alpha via “alpha-make texture” and filled a layer with it. i fiddled with render-adjustments. over this greyscaleimage i applied a simple-brush drag-rectangle-stroke of the original (colored) texture at low rgb-value and put it in place via move and size-gyro. voila.
blahblahblah… hope you’ll like it and might find a few of the techniques helpful for projects of your own. any tips on how to overcome the problems mentioned would be mucho appreciated, as would be some master-modellers reed 
- juandel
your organic stuff amazes me,nice 2d-3d blend 
edit as per next day: the seawater was done with 3d-brush/dragrectangle with default alpha (a little noise on)/refraction and a customized gel material. that gave it a wavy look right away, the rest was spraystroke for foam and lowintensity contrast-brush.
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