Fantasy Galleon

[Redrobes]

There is a tutorial and a script to automate making seamless tiles here...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1373

The problem that you have is that the overall contrast of the tile is too high and it needs 'flattening'. Using the script there are two parameters, one is the flattening amount 1 - 3. I would go for 2 unless you think otherwise. And the second parameter is the image to tile and flatten.

To break up repeating patterns of a seamless and flat tile. Take a layer and flood it with the tile as you have already done. Then take another layer and flood it with the same tile but stretched a bit in both directions. Resample it maybe 131% or so and then flood it into layer 2. Then blend both layers together. Prefereably with a nice noise function but you can do a straight 50:50 average and it still looks good.

[cniemira]

Well, I think I'm making progress in the water department.

I started by "flattening" out my water tile. The IM script Redrobes provided didn't work out very well for me (might just be my result with this tile).

Before:


After:

Yikes! Even more contrast in that one. I eventually just resorted to tweaking the color levels by hand with The Gimp, and got this (this is actually my second version. The first was a bit more turquoise until I turned the blue back up. See below):


When combined with a semi-transparent cloud render as Midgardsormr suggests, here's what I got:



I didn't like the turq color, nor did I feel there was enough "noise" from that cloud, so I tweaked a bit more and came up with this:



You can still see the water "pattern" if you look for it, though.

[cniemira]

Turning up the opacity on the cloud layer a few percent gets me this:

[Redrobes]

There is a level 1 to 3 for the flattening. If you go for 3 then its pretty tough on the flattening. Anyway I think your new texture is great.

[Ascension]

I agree, this one is looking pretty good. And the boat aint bad either.

[torstan]

Yep, looks good to me. You can also continue to work into it by finding other lextures, putting them on layers over the base one and changing their blend mode to soft/hard light or overlay. That should help to break up any remaining repeating details. This can also be done with clouds filters as layer masks.

Looking good, and great to see a few more ships around here.

[cniemira]

Thanks for all of the feedback and encouragement everyone! I'm learning a ton from this one simple map, and every time I do something I get a little faster and a little better at it (except the renders... those are painfully slow).

When I get home tonight, I'll start putting together the other decks.