Sea Battle Map(s)

[xv43]

Okay, this is the first map I've got for a scenario, but it highlights mostly what I'm doing. The other maps will have two ships at rest (boarding each other, really), and the same ship in shallower water (which I'm planning to pretty much just lighten up the colors to accomplish).

I'm looking for feedback mostly on scale, the water texture, and the wake, but anything is welcome. I made the water myself using a lava render with a blue gradient, then a lava render with a green gradient, then layered them on top of each other with some opacity playthings. Got a little more texture to the water by bump mapping it with some directional light.

The ship I did not make, but got from rpgmapshare. I think it's a beautiful boat.

The wake was just some white airbrush on a layer sandwiched between the ship and the water that was then blurred.

I'm planning to crop the ship out of the excess water when it comes time to actually use it. This will be used with maptool, so I don't want to place a grid on it.

I wasn't exactly sure where to post this, so I put it here... if this is the wrong place, please let me know and/or move it.

[Sigurd]

Its very pretty.

Not exactly a map though, more like a picture of a ship. The boat looks a little transparent.

Nice water texture. Its very hard to get a truly realistic water, what with movement and foam.

Sigurd

[Ascension]

A few months back I needed to do a wake as well and here's an image I found (after Googling up a search on "boat wakes"). I drew up my wakes for my Snagglefjord map based on this. There are some caveats though, speed of the boat also has an impact on size of wake, as well as direction of water flow (for rivers), and hull shape for shape of wake.

[xv43]

Did you use that just as a design model, or did you actually try something fancy with it? Maybe grayscale it and turn it into a layer mask?

I realize it's not much of a map, that's part of why I had a hard time locating a place for it in the forums... since everything is going to take place on the ship, there isn't much in the way of mapping to do... this is the first time I've created water, though, so I was hoping I didn't totally futz it up

I'm not sure why the boat appears a little transparent... it isn't, but I think I see what you're getting at. Maybe I need to put a dark outline around it or something to make it stand out a little more?

Zooming in, I think the wake is a little too transparent and I should thicken bits of it to block more of the water.

[Ascension]

The boat looks fine to me but I'd put a lil brown on it instead of the original gray, that's probably why it looks a lil transparent. The pics I used as a theoretical base then made my own wakes out of B/W clouds (distorted and manhandled into shape of course) to resemble what the they should look like.

[torstan]

As far as the water's concerned I think you might have the bump mapping the wrong way round. The high area of the water seem to be wide and flat with thin dips between them. Generally on water this is the other way around, with wide dips and short sharp peaks of chop. I'd be interested to see how this looked if the pattern you used for the bump mapping was inverted.