There were a lot of hands on this scene. The gas trees were modeled and animated by Francis Kumashiro, (Junior Animator) using Softimage. I was asked to lighten the scene during render time. Instead of using March Fractal shader in every tree, I used an animated texture map created with the shader and applied it as a 2D animated texture map within Softimage.

I tried various ways of creating the water but, settled for 2Danimated texture maps and reflectivity to the material. Add a few wave generators, tag the tree's to the surface with cluster points and you get a pretty convincing effect.