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).