Well I have a few suggestions:

1/ a perfect cube always looks very fake, use a slightly irregular shape 
like a superellipsoid or isosurface

2/ it's easy to say this after the fact, but the human eye is extremely 
forgiving of reflections in bumpy surfaces, so you really shouldn't worry 
about making a complex sky, just something flat that has the right colours. 
But it sounds like you learnt this the hard way.

3/ think about the size of the ripples regarding the scale of your scene, 
these ones are huge but smooth (particularly in the last image). Smooth 
usually means very small ripples, which would make the stone block about 1cm 
big! I'd suggest use much much smaller ripples, so the surface is nearly 
flat. if you want a dramatically wavey surface for this scale you need 
something less smooth, the wrinkles pattern is sometimes pretty good for 
this, or granite (inverted to make spikey waves).

4/ water material - a physically correct water is simply: pigment{rgbt 
1}finish{reflection{0,1 fresnel}}interior{ior 1.33 fade_colour ... 
fade_power 2 fade_distance ...}, there's a lot of tweaks you can do but that 
should get you something good. Basically it's transparent, refractive, the 
reflections obey fresnel so there's no need to tweak them, and if you want 
to colour it you should use fade_colour not pigment because the colour 
should be throughout the material not just at the surface.

5/ stone material - always reference a real material, in your present scene 
I can't tell if it's meant to be a polished stone like marble, or a more 
natural rough finish. A realistic rough finish is easier: just give it a 
noisy normal, like normal { granite -.2 }, and no specular or phong. A 
realistic smooth finish is difficult because smooth things look fake in CG, 
I'd suggest choosing a stone with a very distinctive pattern, like marble or 
something. And on that topic note that pov's granite pattern looks more like 
marble than the marble pattern...

6/ use global_settings { assumed_gamma 1 }, it screws up all the colours in 
the scene so you'll need to adjust them, but it make reflections and 
lighting look more realistic.

Hope that's helpful and not patronising :)

I'd be happy to knock together an example scene of how I'd do it if you 
think it would help?
-- 
Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

"Orchid XP v3" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:452791f9@news.povray.org...
> The concept was simple: a stone block sitting in a pool of rippling
> water, with some assorted glassare on top.
>
> Well, I made the pool and the stone block. But, as you can see, the
> results were pittiful to say the least. (The last two even use an
> extremely slow volumetric cloud algorithm - not that you can tell!)
>
> I despare sometimes. I can't made even the simplest thing look *good*!
> >_< This just looks pathetic...
>
> Can *anybody* tell me how to make this look cool like everybody else's
> renders do??
>

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