Image 2: Second WIP mud example. The water looks very muddy and washed out as in real life. Stones look a bit too gelly currently.

So, I started to think about what happens to a place with almost nonmoving water and searched for that kind of references too.

Instead of creating a beach gravel scenery, this texture became one big piece of nature where water was involved and I always wanted to try out some tricks with water. Then the next key thing is to get all elements play well together. The water with the stones, so make the stones wet and dry on top. Put some fishes in the water to make it alive. Add fallen flower petals, twigs and other natural elements to improve the feel of having a snapshot from a wet gravel piece of nature. The sand was a bonus and here I wanted to see if I can let the sand play together with the water, meaning, let the sand flow towards the water and let it spread out and make it muddy in certain areas. Here I used my flow node to create some flows that wrap around stones. These elements are hardly visible within the final render, but I consider these typical elements you’ll miss if they are not there. My background is about animation, and animation is a lot about tricking one’s mind, so I believe the same is true for textures or even everything about digital creation.