This time around I decided to get back into the material editor a bit more. I created a water material that moves downstream to give a bit more life to the scene. Once I figured out how to pan each section of the texture at different speeds, it was just a matter of creating a texture with specific alpha information in the RGB channels. Having the sparkle effect in the middle of the texture came about from a "happy accident" when I multiplied the alpha from the panning texture with the stationary one. Mucked around with the lighting as well. It's still a bit harsh so I'll mess with it some more next time I visit this scene.
Speaking of which, the next goal for this scene is to get a simple rotation animation on the clouds and birds in the sky. That, and I'll try to get some texture updates so I can mess with the specularity on these assets some more. Mucho graciado to Joe Joyal for helping me get up to speed with the material editor.
