The goal of this work was to make use of large body of water as well as a more vibrant skybox, as these are things I was new to.
The main hinderance was the size of the terrain for the project. Most of the time I use a terrain of 500x500 and use half of it, whereas Lakeside uses a full 1000x1000 terrain as well as background terrains of 500x500. This tops it at 3000 which is the biggest I've ever used and makes it less performant.
I overcame this by excluding grass and rocks from the scene, as they would be covered by the tree lines anyway. Furthermore, half of the trees are billboarded to save from generating their meshes at distance.
The most striking points of the level, the water and skyline, are extremely saturated due to post processing. However, I used a more colourful and vibrant HDRI for my skybox as well as using reflective water to show how vast and clear the world is.
The water is a large plane with various normal map and reflective properties. This worked well with the panoramic HDRI to show a vast and clear world. While the skybox is very saturated, it was intensified through Post Processing to add atmosphere.
Post processing plays a major part in not only intensifying the pink and blue sky, but also blending the terrain into the water edge. On top of that a dirt lens with a high intensity benefits the view by not only adding dirt to lens, but also faint stars in the sky.