How to make waves and surf breaks?

[Martin Hoyem]

I am new to the forum, so I hope this is the type of question that fits here:

I'm trying to find if there is a tutorial of sorts for the effect described by Tom Patterson on one of the pages of his website, and effect that is used in the US National Parks maps. The effect I am interested in is shown about halfway down this page, in fig. 8:

https://www.shadedrelief.com/realism/index.html

I'm working in Photoshop and ArcGIS, but if there are other tools I should look into, that's okay, too. Does anybody know if there is a tutorial out there, or some type of description on how to achieve this effect?

Thanks for any reply!

[waldronate]

Have you tried asking him directly? He's pretty enthusiastic about mapping and may already have a step-by-step tutorial for that effect.

To a first approximation, use something like a tiling leather (or other noise) texture stretched along one direction and color-shifted to blue for the waves and then draw the surf breaks by hand. You'll notice that the wave pattern in that image isn't an appropriate scale (those waves would be almost a mile from peak to peak) and doesn't match the topography (waves would bend as they approach the shallows). Similarly, the wave breaks are radically out of scale. Together, however, they give the idea of wind from a particular direction. The sun glint plus clouds hide the parts of that texture that would break the suspension of disbelief.
Cartography is at its heart the art of abstracting information about a place and in this case, the ocean surface texture is an abstract feature intended to give the impression of an important feature of the map without explicitly labeling it (so sayeth the man himself in the accompanying text).

[Redrobes]

I could not tell you how to get that effect exactly but I can offer a free tool which might be able to get you some basic starting point which you can blend in as part of a process.

In my sig there is a link to my free tools and one of them is "Put a ring on it 1" which will generate wavy effects around shapes. Its best to use black and white shapes and its set to produce the waves at a fixed spacing so you will have to adjust the resolution of the starting image to get the preferred ringing distances.

But starting with a black and white image of the land mass load that into the source image of the filter (1). Press the Run button, keep refreshing (using the page refresh button not browser refresh button) until it generates the output image and save it (2). From there you can use the contrast and intensity curve tools to get the ringing up to a level that you are happy (3). Then blend that into your coloured image to suit (4). (5) is blown up view of part of it.

So its not too special but its very simple and quick to generate.

There are better ways to get surf and more detailed sea effects but to do that you really need the 3D landscape as a DEM which includes some bathymetry and then shade it based on the land height / sea depth. With a complex enough shader you can program it to generate the beach, surf and depth information in the sea. The best example I can give of this are some islands I had to do:

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=6551
(esp https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...8&d=1250977010)
(or this one where I animated it: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post351520)

But the shading script is quite complex and not easily explained - which is why I made the free tools link so that you can use some of the stuff very easily and not get into the weeds with the shader programming.

[Chashio]

You could paint it by hand. Or carve it by hand...mix up some plain yogurt and peanut butter (thickens it) and drag a fork or spoon through it to form waves...take a photo top down and paste it into your map as a layer you can adjust to fit...scale it appropriately, soften/blur, change the color, etc...you can use the clone stamp tool to fine tune and blend things together as needed. You also get a tasty snack with this method. Add some cocoa powder and a bit of confectioners sugar to the mix for a bit of dessert

[XCali]

My favorite method is find a ripples in water texture, desaturate it, and then it is using it on layers with Overlay and or Multiply above the color layer. (Making it into a seamless tile works amazing. Been using it for years.)

Nahas_Main_v26_d Icon.jpeg

AND then if you want to get fancy, you can draw highlights and shadows on the waves to make it pop out of the image. For the water breaking on the shore, I'd use a random cloud brush and use colors from real waves and for the highlights use low opacity swipes to get that random spray, and for the darker parts higher opacity.

Wave preview.png