Ocean effects

[Mouse]

Hi

This is an experiment to see if I can get a half decent ocean going in GIMP in a similar way to the way I would do it in CC3, and this is the first test run:

Ocean test.jpg

For this test I used multiple layers of different textures - completely filling each layer with the one texture using the fill bucket and fills I created to do this map. Most have a mask to enable painting by transparency in black and white.

The ocean layers (excluding the land ones) are in this order:

surf - ordinary transparent layer on which the surf is drawn in white

Ocean deep - multiply mode ocean texture layer with layer mask and painted transparency
Ocean mid - as above
Ocean shallow - as above

The three ocean layers are all the same ocean texture, but adjusted in tone and colour from turquoise on the shallow layer to darker blue on the deep layer

seaweed - normal mode - an entire sheet of the seaweed texture with a layer mask and painted visible
rocks - as above
Base Sand dry - as above
Base Sand wet - a straightforward background

Feel free to ask questions/make suggestions

[Redrobes]

I was at the coast a couple of weeks ago and was taking reference photos of just this kind of thing when I saw some good examples. So ill add them here. What I saw and liked is the way the 3D'ness of the rocks underwater get a nice kind of depth thing going on with the turquoise water filter. When I do my maps with the heightmaps I have a big script which automatically generates this kind of thing but its not using gimp so I cant help with the execution side of it. My heightmaps usually have all sand like going out from the beach and when I saw these rocks I thought that I ought to put more in like what you have done and see if I can mod my script to generate that kind of blue filter effect. Yours looks real nice as always.

EDIT: Just checking if I had any pics of my script doing its thing for comparison and I managed to find some pics:
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...emo012_png.htm
So similar but less rocky.

[Voolf]

The waves near the sand look quite good, but the one far from shore not so much, They are too wide, too straight and too far away imo.

[Mouse]

I was at the coast a couple of weeks ago and was taking reference photos of just this kind of thing when I saw some good examples. So ill add them here. What I saw and liked is the way the 3D'ness of the rocks underwater get a nice kind of depth thing going on with the turquoise water filter. When I do my maps with the heightmaps I have a big script which automatically generates this kind of thing but its not using gimp so I cant help with the execution side of it. My heightmaps usually have all sand like going out from the beach and when I saw these rocks I thought that I ought to put more in like what you have done and see if I can mod my script to generate that kind of blue filter effect. Yours looks real nice as always.

EDIT: Just checking if I had any pics of my script doing its thing for comparison and I managed to find some pics:
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...emo012_png.htm
So similar but less rocky.

WOW! What I struggled for several hours to achieve, you can do automatically? That's brilliant. In fact, its better than a Vue ocean - several times better!

Will you be publishing your app?

Getting down to the grit...

Those shots you took are a fascinating comparison. Thank you for showing them. I can see that I have some work to do on my rocky texture. I may need to do a couple of them instead of just one homogenous version, since there is clearly quite a difference between rounded boulders and straighter chunks of rock between the two shots - or maybe I' just need to emphasise more variable shapes with my seaweed?

I think I may also need to add just one more layer, called 'surface glare', to mimic the reflection I see in your shots. I could use it to very faintly shade larger wave patterns out to sea, since I assume that in a top down view on flat water the angle of incidence at which the light (also from above in my mind) strikes the water, it wouldn't reflect the sky quite as much, but be absorbed by the water instead - making it appear darker. The sloping fronts and backs of the waves might be caught, though. That would have to be a bonus effect for me with my GIMP attempt - for maps that have lots of water that would otherwise be a bit boring to look at without at least the faintest hint of something a bit further out from shore.

Thanks for the compliment

The waves near the sand look quite good, but the one far from shore not so much, They are too wide, too straight and too far away imo.

Thanks Voolf

I see what you mean about the second surf. In truth I only added that layer in the last 5 minutes of working on the test. The closest ones need to be made more bubbly (you can still see my hastily scribbled lines), while those furthest from the shore could possibly be smudged nearly out of existence and turned into 'wave shading' on the glare sheet I'm going to add, I think?

[Redrobes]

With my script you need (ok not need but dead useful to have) a height map and maybe a vegetation map but essentially yes its automated - which is why all my maps look the same. I dont put a lot of effort into them

Will I publish the app. Actually thats a possibility this time ! Its not GeoTerSys which is the nightmare app to use which is what I use to generate all of the masks for it but if you do create the masks manually, and thats not that hard, then it works great. My app is a programmable texture engine. You load up the seamless texture swatches, and the greyscale masks, and the height maps and then this giant set of graphs and rules as a text file.

So it maps greyscale or height map values to textures and applies them with the rule set.

You then say how big the output image should be and then let it go. A few seconds later and voila you have the fully textured up map.

I did my city sector base map using it with the viewingdale icons on the top and I use that kind of process for practically every map I ever do - even the dungeon types.

You can easily do everything this app does on Gimp only this app captures the process in the text script and you can rerun it with changes and tweaks or just let it rip with the same set on a completely new height map and masks set and it generates a new but similar terrain.

The guild was going to do some selling of stuff but it kinda didnt pan out. I was going to put it up on that. Maybe I should do it on RPG now or something. All it would need is a big help file. Its command line as usual and was used in the massive build system that was in MeDem to texture each of the 1600 tiles used to make up the terrain. I also used it to texture up each frame in the animated sequences for a demo movie clip.

I'll have another think about doing that.

[Mouse]

When an app works and produces a spectacular effect like that, it should sell like hotcakes

[Redrobes]

Ok, ill make up a new thread and talk about it a bit and see if anyone is interested in me putting it out there.

[Mouse]

I don't mind you using this thread if you want. I'm a little too busy trying to do something else at the moment, and I think I've achieved what I wanted to achieve anyway, which was a usable GIMP version of the ocean effects I did for Scribble Rock in the May/June Lite Challenge.

It turns out that I didn't invent anything at all in the end - but only re-discovered by trial and error a technique of mapping with GIMP and layer masks that jfrazierjr did a tutorial on back in 2009