My thanks to Bryce and Djeser for their words of encouragement *s*

This peculiar looking island scene came about due to Bryce's info on creating terrains with transparent borders. I'm not happy with the end result but it was an interesting process to get to this point.

I was trying to create a tropical atoll in shallow water with a suggestion of submerged sandbars. I wanted green terra firma with a beach surrounding it so used the terrain preset 'Whole Mountain'. This was after I'd eroded the mountain and made the borders transparent. Unfortunately the beach runs through the atoll in parallel bars not around it...god only knows why ;) The island is not sitting correctly (it's above not flush with the water) but after watching it render I didn't have the heart to redo it...again ;)

I've used a few 'layers' some of which I probably didn't need - sky, the final terrain (most underlying). I wanted translucent water with a particular surface texture but at this elevation the surface detail doesn't show. It would be more effective I think at much closer quarters. Something to fiddle with later. The layers are shown below in descending order as per the rendered pic.

The settings below are for the most part the presets (?) - I lost track of the ones I played with and those I left alone. Hence this is version 8 ;) The layer below is the first water layer, followed by the second (descending). By leaving them both transparent, I hoped the underlying terrain would come through as sand bars.

Not sure if the next one was necessary though there seemed to be a change when I removed it?

Some questions for the unwary ;):

1. Does physically distancing layers from one another make any difference at all to the look of the thing? (I had to ask ;)

2. In order to create a beach surrounding the island (with transp. edges), should that be done to the existing preset in the Deep Texture Editor?

3. Was the use of two water layers viable? Should this have been done instead using one water layer and different textures?