Although the creating the 3D bit is a bit time consuming the texturing side of doing the sea is not all that hard. You get a lot of result for not a lot of effort building the shader. It looks like its more work than it really is. If you can get something like Wilbur or your Vue to generate the terrain including the subsea bathymetry then doing the texturing this way is a good call. The main thing I like about doing it this procedural way without manually touching the bitmap with a pen is that if I move a rock then I can rebuild the image. If that rock is moved so it pokes thought the surface then it shades up all the foam on it. So all the late stage fiddling gets done for you. The artistic side of it is limited to the heightmap and perhaps not even that.
So late last evening I took my mosaic photo and squared it up using Gimps perspective tool which is a pretty cool function. I clipped the centre panel out which is the one of Dido and two cohorts. I was originally going to use the one with the Roman soldier Aenius in it but the centre panel seemed to fit better. Again, I made a mask for it and put it into the layer for the texture engine. It shades the mosaic after the sand but before all the sea so that the caustics get applied to it. Talking of which I decided to increase the strength of that texture and I made the sea darker. I added a second foam texture since the first one was pattern repeating a bit and I also increased the height of the villa walls because they didn't seem very prominent.
I went back and referenced my photo which I took this summer of underwater rocks like this and noticed that rocks that were underwater or partially out of the water had a greenish tint from the barnacles and other organisms that live in the sea. Those that dry out and get sun seem to turn white from the suns bleaching rays killing it off and also lichens. Not sure what its like in the rest of the world but in the UK we have this white splats of lichen which form on rocks by the sea. I have added a green patina to the rocks which are below a certain height of about a couple of metres.
At this point I dont really have a sense of scale to the image. I will be putting a boat on the top with a diver but I could make the diver half the size of the mosaic or a tenth of it. If anyone wants to comment whether they think the villa should be large or small or have more walls and be more complex than this single room then I would be keen to know. Its sort of turning into a diorama rather than a map.
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