waterfall test 3.JPG
Okay, so... awkward. I kept tinkering with this and I'm actually really happy with the result. I think it fits the style of the map, and most definitely conveys there is a waterfall there. Changes:
I made two more sheets: RIPPLES and SUBRIPPLES; ripples was on top of WATER and subripples is on top of SUBWATER. I killed the drop shadow from FLOORS and changed the two Glow effects to match WALLS (outer, black, 1, 0.5 and outer, black, 0, 3) so they have about the same depth now. I literally found the technique that worked by accident:
On the RIPPLES sheet I drew a 0.1 width fractal path (white) along the contour of the ledge (on the water), then drew another one farther back, and another, increasing the spacing, and making dashed lines by the 4th or 5th line. Then I added a Transparency (20%) effect to RIPPLES, which faded them out nicely to match the existing ripples in the texture. Then... I put a Glow (outer, white, 2, 2) on RIPPLES, and BAM! They popped with the beautiful hazy effect. You have to make sure the Glow is above the Transparency though, or it gets killed by it.
After that I repeated the process on the SUBRIPPLES sheet, spacing my contour lines out even farther, to where eventually their glow effect doesn't stack up and you can actually see the lines clearly. Because they are below the FLOORS sheet they still get shadowed, as well. I'm sure I'll end up tinkering with this even more, but I am so happy that I got it looking this good!
I'd still like to hear any tips anyone else might have though, because I literally stumbled up this effect on accident. If I hadn't drawn my first batch of contour lines so close together on accident, I probably wouldn't even have found this.
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