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

Cube is a placeholder, yes. I was attempting to get the stone texture 
and the water to look right first. (I intend to replace it with a 
rounded cube later.)

> 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.

I only used the complex volumetric sky because I already had one from 
another scene that had the right colours, and I couldn't come up with a 
static pigment with anything approaching the right colours.

For my trouble, I ended up with an entire scene that's bright blue. (Why 
does the real world not do this BTW? The real sky is blue...)

> 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).

OK. I'm currently investigating Christoph's waver macro. Seems to 
produce big fractal-like waves. (I'd actually like the ripples to 
radiate from the stone block and follow its shape eventually...)

> 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.

The water *itself* is a fairly simple thing, as you say. It's 
transparent, refractive and reflective. So basically it doesn't look 
like anything by itself... gotta have something nice to reflect.

My main problem seems to be getting a decent sky. :-S

> 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...

The look I'm eventually going for is water-polished rock. Maybe 
limestone or something. So I probably just need to make it look slightly 
lumpy... and get better colours...

> 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.

I wouldn't have thought assumed_gamma 1 would have *any* effect... 
surely that just means that each colour component is raised to the power 
of 1 before being output?

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