DrMCClark:

Strangely, I didn't get an ebot from your post - good thing you PM'd me.

Forgive the dumb question, but you do have ray tracing turned on in render options, right? The refraction and reflection nodes only come with ray tracing.

Also make sure the sand extends way out under the water. Otherwise, what you see through the water will be your sky dome, which is blue. (Or maybe not, I see some big white area in the upper right. What is that?

Failing that, what exactly are you using for the water geometry? The reason I ask is that the curved edge makes me think its a custom object you made. Are you sure the object vertices have proper UV coordinates? If you just model some shape but don't UV map it, it has the same UV coordinates at every point, which means the U or V nodes won't produce any variation. To test this, make a new material for the water. Turn off diffuse, specular, everything. Now connect a V_Texture_Coordinate to the Ambient_Color input and set Ambient_Value to 1. Render. Your water object should have a smooth, black-to-white gradient from one edge to the other. If its all gray or white or black, whatever shade, but just one shade everywhere, then the problem is you don't have any texture coordinates on the geometry.

If the refraction and UV coordinates are working, then I may be seeing another problem. I can see a shadow under the more distant parts of the water, where it curves a lot. (You'll need to fix that by lowering the water) But meanwhile, because I can see "under" the water, I can see that the shadow is very blue-green. So your sand surface under the water is going to give the refraction a blue-green tint anyway.  Try changing the sand to white, at least to see if that's the problem. You'll notice in my render that the sand was much lighter. If the sand is already dark aqua, then the entire surface will be aqua.

Let me know what you find after answering these questions. If none of these fixes it, we can work on it some more, but I'll need more information.

By the way, good catch. I noticed you fixed a bug in my material. I accidentally deleted the connection to the reflection_Value input. You figured it out on your own. My mistake would cause the foam to be reflective as well, which is obviously not desirable :) 

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)