hey mike... the wet sand by the water is dark, the dry sand by the dunes is light. ;) mud, look for a material in.... its either landscapes or rocks, it is mixed sand and wet sand. play with that a bit. the other thing i ended up doing for my last beach scen (which won't render, but that's another story) is cutting out little semi-circles in the edge of the terrain so that my groundplane water looked as if it were flowing up the beach in different sections, instead of mostly straight. actually, you can draw incoming waves in the terrain editor and clip off the ends, then put those on your beach.