So right now I am working on a personal project for a crucial part of my portfolio. It is a crudely modeled environment with a spherical panoramic matte painting projected from an origin, it is also lined up with a sphere that is offsetting the image in the background. This is the zoomed out view of the scene in persp camera

http://postimage.org/image/z66dj7nyn/

Here is a shot from a camera fixed in translation at the origin

http://postimage.org/image/67lwwn767/

My goal is to finish with a pan and tile animation or sequence. Since this is my first major project using maya I am finding myself over my head as I am nearing the end where the little things start to matter. The matte painting will be the majority of the source for detail and all I am really looking for at this point is to breathe some life into the scene, such as moving waves, possibly tree leaves in the wind, birds, fog etc. pretty much the icing on the cake.

The problem is my modeling is not really up to par with the painting, making it difficult for integration. My first attempt is with the ocean, producing these kinds of results

http://postimage.org/image/hvfyr6wb3/

It's a start, but it is heavily lacking. Here is the geometry the painting is projected on to, just to give you an idea of what I am working with.

http://postimage.org/image/8z56n95ov/

I have been all over search engines trying to find a way out of this jam and finding that I hardly know how to ask the right questions let alone knowing if it's something worth looking into at all. I need some solutions that will be kind of like shortcuts, if you will, because I really don't have time to learn how to bluntly tighten the model up. Thanks for reading this, I really appreciate any advice that can be thrown my way.