Hmm could you post an example of the effect that you're after?
I am currently trying to map something out for a pirate's campaign. Things were going along just fine until I got to the water. The problem I find is that I can't get a water texture that looks good. I know there are tutorials on water textures but they are all for water at close views primarily in the city sized map range. How does one go about making water look realistic at regional levels?
I tried using a low setting bas relief overlay followed by a bit of added noise. However, it still doesn't look right to me. Any ideas on how to fix it?
Hmm could you post an example of the effect that you're after?
how about something like this?
Filter -> Render -> Clouds (black and white as foreground and background color)
Filter -> Noise -> Median 10 pixels
Filter -> Render -> Lighting 5 omni's, each in a corner, one in the center with settings: Intensity 6, Gloss -100, Material 100, Exposure 0, Ambience 10, Texture Channel Red, White is high, and slider all the way to mountainous.
Duplicate the layer, set one at screen and one at multiply at about 30 opacity. And add a outer glow.
I usually go with some distortion filter to get a bit of waves. If you go with woekans method i think you should make a pattern with some waves, noise and cloud and use as heightmap.
I thought that your deep water looked fine but its the land sea interface thats a bit out. It looks like the land sits on top floating over the water. If you have a height map of the terrain then you can do some texturing based on the depth of the water. Otherwise a thin line of beaches, rocks or cliffs and some undersea aqua colored tints to bring out the sandy floor is about all you can do.
And you can get the coastal sediment swirls by running a displace filter on a solid white land area twice, using opposite signs each time.
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The problem is that everything starts to look patterned when filling large amounts of sea space. The first step I usually do is to make a new cloud layer on top, select > color range > use black then hide this cloud layer and go back to the "waves" layer (not the sea blue layer) and hit the delete key. This takes out big chunks of waves and leaves us with flat places and textured places and looks more random than the straight up layer filled to the brim with texture. Then I do up another layer for the green bits around the coast and crop out everything after a certain distance. The method mentioned by Woekan looks like it's taken from my tutorial on making a continent (with some edits but essentially the same) so give that a look see.
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I messed around with it a bit and tried out the sea floor height map idea. I think it worked, though I would like to know what everyone else thinks.