the next step was to improve the surroundings of the pier, i created a long hill, covered in grass, this bends round so that it doesn't just simply come to a end, the pavement at the entrance of the pier is copied and follows the hill, as does the road and sand.

The water was created with a water texture found on the 3ds max library, i then added several bump maps, increasing in size and a noise map ontop of this. i then made it reflective.

for the sky i added a large Geosphere, and applied a sky material found on google, then in the modifier panel i selected "Normal" this flipped all the polygons so the sky material was on the inside, rather then the outside.

a Omni light was then added to act as the sun. Rather then having it as a default of white, i gave it a grey/cream colour and increased the intesity slightly.

the combination of all these gave this result.