Ocean/Water Texture Tutorial (GIMP)

[Prevana'Dei]

Hi all,

I've been sorely lacking in revisiting the forum. In the two years since I've posted, I think I've really improved with my map making. I'm still struggling with mountains and such but I'm getting the hang of the textures - I think. Anyway, I'm still at work on my Cranthem novel and while trying to create a map for one of the lands I got bored and wanted a cool water texture for the ocean.

So I open up gimp and started messing around with clouds and distortions. Eventually I came up with something I liked and feel it's fairly easy to replicate, especially for those familiar with Gimp.

I offer ye tutorial for all to use. Unfortunately my photo-heavy version is long and bulky ( I'm on Mac and Pages is being stubborn with resizing photos and aligning text), so I made a revised simpler version that's text only. The image on the cover is what the effect will look like, or something similar depending on the settings you use.

Let me know what you think and if you use it for your map, i'd like to see what it looks like. I'm still figuring out a land texture that works well with this water texture and have spent the last two or so hours checking out all the awesome textures on the forums, but suggestions and recommendations are always appreciated.

Note: If you do want to see the photo-heavy version head over to my DA page.

Enjoy!!

-Prevana'Dei

[ChickPea]

This looks really nice! I had a peek at the DeviantArt version too, and I'll definitely be giving this a try. Thank you!

[Prevana'Dei]

Hi ChickPea,

You're Welcome. A lot of the time my best stuff is created by accident -- not entirely sure that's a good thing, but this time it seemed to work out.

[ChickPea]

Yeah, it's fun just to mess about with filters and see what you come up with. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's enjoyable. Thanks again for the tut.

[nll9417]

Thanks for this, I always appreciate a straight to the point and useful tutorial. I hadn't realized the bump map/soft light combo existed within GIMP prior to this.
I would like to save some time for the prospective reader that wants a tileable texture- one method is to use the following technique to make plasma tileable
http://www.trueelena.org/computers/h...a_in_gimp.html

Obvious to some perhaps, but worthy of mention...
The radial displace and iwarp distortions will need some bounds boxing and cloning/blending touch-ups to remain tileable.
Also color band operations such as levels balancing can sometimes interrupt a cross-seam gradient leaving visual artifacts.