So, I ended up doing the "skirts" method I spoke of in the last post. And in conjunction with the default Urho3D water shader (with a few small tweaks, and more to come to eliminate artifacts on the corners of the water blocks) it actually looks pretty decent. The water animates a noise texture that ripples the ground beneath. It also uses a reflection texture (which I have set to black at the moment) if desired. I might tweak the water shader further, but for now I'm happy with it. I've also got all the small issues sorted out from the change to multi-level water. It wasn't a large change, but I was surprised at how many different parts of the code worked from the assumption that water was determined by elevation < 9. I thought I had contained it better than that, but I did get all the various spellcasting, pathfinding and object spawning oddities worked out.