I was browsing through some links the other day and came upon Richard Rosenman's website: https://www.richardrosenman.com/
and saw his sphere projects and thought i'd do something similar. these are not entirely done, and still could use some work, mostly the first and last one.
the first one is pretty washed out and i don't know how to fix it without re rendering. as for the sand one, i plan on adding a pile of sand on the ground and have streams of sand coming off of it if i can. the water one is mostly done, the only thing i might add would be caustics if i had the time to render them in.