Beach WIP

Got a new idea in my head today; I need to make something legit, because I’ve been slacking off a bit for the last couple of years. “Beach” is the title I have in my head right now, but I’m making a progress thread and we’ll see where this goes.
Day 1 template (I don’t really expect any feedback yet because I only worked on this for like an hour):


what is it?

It’s an image I couldn’t get out of my head, couldn’t work on it yesterday because I was driving home from college and blender on my home PC was messing up, but here’s further progress:



Can’t figure out how to make a hair particle system cast a soft shadow, the ray traced shadow I’m using just makes dots on the bottom, anyone know of a fix?

Last render of the night, may not be able to post in the next couple o days because Christmas and lack of internet. Got grass looking close to what I want it to, still don’t know how to make hair shadows on the emitter


did some work on the top today; messed around with a lot of stuff and made more textures and ended up deleting them because they didn’t look good, but here you go:


I like it… but it would be better (in my opinion) if you could make the border of the grass and the ground less obvious (like in the first grass render, where I like the size gradient of the grass, but not the colour, the colour is better in the later images)…

^^ good point, just didn’t look good at high resolution, but I’ll keep that in mind maybe, thanks!
New Update: