This was the first time that I’ve used EEVEE for a complex scene with water and natural elements, mostly because I was planning to render out an animation and I wanted to keep the per-frame render time at a reasonable level. Both haze and water behave very different with EEVEE compared to cycles and I had to relearn how to make the scene look how I intended.
Since I did not want to move the camera during the animation, I could use some extreme stage craft with my assets to give the illusion of a pond in a forest, without actually creating a full model of the landscape.
The free HDR from BlenderKit (“mossy-forest”) did a lot of the heavy lifting, especally for the implied underwater structure of the pond and the hazy forest background.
The eventual goal was to create a looping animation so that it can be easily extended to an hour-long video. I rendered out a 12-second animation and then found a 10-second sequence in that video that can be looped with an acceptable cut. Here is the 1-hour video loop on YouTube:
