The original move is way before my time, but I am pretty sure we rented it on video, or more likely, we were visiting some friends of my parents, and they had rented it for us kids. Back then it took ages just for a film to hit rental, and the number of new movies flowing in wasn't that great, so the old ones hade a rather long shelf life.
I appreciate the problems with getting the symbol to work right, Sue. And this one will look good as the tops of forest kelp and other denser seaweeds, aside from its intended eelgrass, so it's win-win, I think!
Mysterious Island keeps coming round on British TV from time to time still. Perhaps most famous still for containing some of Ray Harryhausen's excellent stop-motion animations.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with this Sue, as you know I'm a big fan of watery dungeons and battlemaps.
p.s. Sorry I've not been around, trying to get back into RPGs and mapping again at the moment, I kind of lost my motivation during the last lockdown. Not even sure why, but I'm planning to get mapping again ASAP.
I think underwater walls viewed from the surface should be ruined so at least part of them could be above water. I'm curious what the sheet effects for this might be.
BTW, I vaguely remember a short lived TV series where some modern U.S. Navy divers discovered the mothballed Nautilus (which was apparently nuclear powered) on the sea floor with Captain Nemo in suspended animation inside. For some reason (which I cannot remember) the Navy gave him a full crew of submariners and sent them on special missions.
I have yet to work out, though if this is best done by a range of different length symbols (not connecting), or a fill. Lines are so... straight, so it looks like more symbols. This is going to be a very symbol-heavy style with all the weed and rocks. I may rethink the walls, but the fill is a handy stopgap.
Most of the underwater ruins in documentaries I have seen are ruined walls and statues with sand and various marine plants covering most or part of them.
Coral of various types in the tropics, but in cold areas there are fish and no coral. Barnacles might be there though. Or eels and wood worms.
Yes, ruins are the thing, but where this is a dungeon scale style I might have to make a range of ruined wall bits and pieces rather than drawing whole buildings.
Another decision I had to make early on was whether to try and do a bit of each (cold water and tropical water), or just one but with twice as much variety. At the moment I'm working on weeds and rocks. We'll see what I have time for after that ;)
Not in this style itself, other than a very small dingy or two.
Shipwrecks of the type you are maybe thinking of are more of a city scale thing - the size of a house, or several houses if you live in a country like the UK, where most people live in places that are relatively small. You could probably fit my flat, for instance, on the aft deck of a medium sized barque.
This is a very nice near-to-beach-scape which could be used as part a tactical map of a tropical shoreline. I really like the shading of the submerged portions and the clear definition of the waterline. It might be interesting to see versions of this map at different tide levels; at high tide the rocks might be completely submerged while a low tide they might be mostly exposed. This could be important in a game when the PCs have to decide when to go swimming or diving.
Sue you are an amazing artist. The only embellishment I could suggest would be to add some understated surface ripples around the waterlines for items above water level.
I tried that already, but they cause too much interference with the rest of the map, being rather too eye-catching in comparison with the real focus, which will be the ruins on the sand below.
Not quite so sold on the geology yet though. The above-sea sand seems a tad too bright, and the white outline looks odd - as also on the surfaced rocks. I think I can see why you've drawn it like this, but actual rocks, and sand, tend to get darker when wet, if sometimes only subtly so, so the line (actually a zone whose size is determined by ripples splashing on the exposed surfaces, were they real) should be darker where the rocks/sand meet the sea.
The stacking of the rocks doesn't look quite right either. Higher rocks should lie at or within the outlines of those below them if supported by only a single rock, as anything else wouldn't be stable, and would simply collapse into a different pattern ordinarily.
Not sure if the rocks are symbols or simply drawn polygons however; if the latter, the stacking problem is easily resolved, and I'd imagine the water-line effect could be handled with an appropriate Inner Glow Effect. If they're symbols, though... sorry!
I've never been further abroad than France, and then only twice when I was still quite young, so I have to go on photos like these, where the edge of the reef looks relatively precipitous. But it is a matter of interpretation.
The rocks are symbols, and they were meant to be things I've heard people say are called 'coral mushrooms', which overhang like a mushroom at the top. I just haven't got around to making enough coral to stick all over the tops of them. I'm not even sure, yet, if I should build the coral topping into the rock symbol, so it doesn't take as much time to do the maps.
I decided not to get too involved with the inanimate objects while I still have the creatures and ruins to do, but I may return to the rocks and corals later. The main concern for me was to get the underwater to feel right by getting the right texture and colour.
OK, this is a bit more "tropical seas only" than I was thinking.
The coral overhang is, as far as I recall, only a thing with living corals, not the underlying rocks (which themselves are likely to be largely made up from increasingly compacted dead coral skeletons). The overhang will only survive as long as its own weight/strength and tidal action allows, of course, so collapse of unsupported areas is still liable to happen, especially when there are no longer living coral polyps there to help keep the whole "glued" together. As you'll gather, I was assuming the rocks were "just" rocks, not intended as the immediate substrate for living corals!
Keeping the coral symbols separate from the rocky bit ones would offer greater flexibility, certainly.
Flexibility is what is intended here. That's why I haven't stuck the corals to the rocks so far ;)
It would only take a little minor tweaking to the colour palette to turn this into a cold temperate sea - the colours being the controlling factor here. Red on the rocks is a common feature. reddish pinkish and whiteish forms occur all over the place. Maybe see these rocks as being particularly marine, and probably limestone.
This is what a change to the colour palette can do.
But the reason I haven't gone for these darker colours that feel more natural to me, living as I do in a temperate zone, it is much harder to see the map on the sea floor. (Apart from the fact that I forgot to switch off the distort sheet)
@Wyvern - take away the coral, leave the starfish and urchin, and add barnacles, mussels and limpets instead... do you think these colours would be a nice compromise for both tropical and temperate seas?
I've also split the rocks so that the underwater ones are darker, and the shore ones have wet sides.
Sue, here is a dive company down in Cayman I used to hang with back in my diving days. There is some videos and galleries (of course it is trying to sell themselves, and it looks like they now have accomadations nearby so you can roll out of bed and dive.). It might give you some ideas.
I noticed you lessened the sharpness (not sure that is the right word?) of the white and black outlines of everything. The outlines don't stand out anymore and look more natural now. Your work on this is beautiful!
@amerigoV - Thank you. I will have a look at that when I get back to the map. Stand alone shadows can be drawn as polygons, or cast by the drop shadow sheet effect.
@George - Thank you very much. In truth all I did was adjust the colour palette and a few of the sheet effects. You would be shocked if you saw this map with effects turned off.
The rocks have always looked fine to me, simply as rocks. The colouring and texture would work nicely for pale sandstones through sandy limestones to limestones, but they'd also look good as pale granites as well.
The very white sand is typical of tropical-coral-debris "sands" (because it's composed mostly of wave-broken-down dead coral); I like the marginally toned-down appearance in your most recent screenshots for this though. That will work for paler sandy deserts too, of course.
REALLY loving the "damped-down" boulder edges now, with the softer edge lines and the nicely organic darker lower areas!
Water-clarity is going to be an issue for anywhere that doesn't regularly get calm-water periods, and also where there are regular amounts of finer materials (silts, muds, less mentionable substances...) being deposited into the near-coastal seas. So it's probably best to ignore that, and go with artistic licence/necessity. As this is a tool for mapping, simply indicating what areas are underwater will be a big help, even if they're not wholly photorealistic for all environments. Should anyone require that for the more variable temperate waters, say, simply suggest adding suitably coloured polygons across the whole underwater area, with a not-very transparent Transparency Effect, and classic muddy waters will magically appear!
Most of the detailed stuff you mention is controlled by sheet effects, so it can all be adjusted quite easily.
The colour of the water is causing quite a lot of comments both here and on the FB page. It appears that what one person finds wonderful and perfect is a psychedelic and completely artificial horror to others. So to solve that issue I will include a range of colour palettes with the annual so that you can pick a theme and modify it if it isn't quite to taste. PALLOAD will access them, but to 'fix' them to each map individually mappers will have to 'Attach to drawing' in the Drawing Presets dialog.
There is even a brand new optional distort sheet that distorts the underwater scene as if it really was underwater, but this will be more useful for people more interested in the illustrative side of things rather than the mapping side, since it plays hell with the clarity of the map :P
Comments
Well, at least we have found some trace of this tale :)
Pretty sure I saw that film back 35 years or so ago.
That would explain it then! I wasn't born till 5 years later, and I must have missed the repeat - if there was one in the UK :)
The original move is way before my time, but I am pretty sure we rented it on video, or more likely, we were visiting some friends of my parents, and they had rented it for us kids. Back then it took ages just for a film to hit rental, and the number of new movies flowing in wasn't that great, so the old ones hade a rather long shelf life.
Ah, back in the days of the video tape :)
That is indeed the movie. I can't explain why I never saw it before when I searched before. Now to see if it is on Amazon Prime!
I appreciate the problems with getting the symbol to work right, Sue. And this one will look good as the tops of forest kelp and other denser seaweeds, aside from its intended eelgrass, so it's win-win, I think!
Mysterious Island keeps coming round on British TV from time to time still. Perhaps most famous still for containing some of Ray Harryhausen's excellent stop-motion animations.
p.s. Sorry I've not been around, trying to get back into RPGs and mapping again at the moment, I kind of lost my motivation during the last lockdown. Not even sure why, but I'm planning to get mapping again ASAP.
BTW, I vaguely remember a short lived TV series where some modern U.S. Navy divers discovered the mothballed Nautilus (which was apparently nuclear powered) on the sea floor with Captain Nemo in suspended animation inside. For some reason (which I cannot remember) the Navy gave him a full crew of submariners and sent them on special missions.
Yes, ruined walls were my first thought.
I have yet to work out, though if this is best done by a range of different length symbols (not connecting), or a fill. Lines are so... straight, so it looks like more symbols. This is going to be a very symbol-heavy style with all the weed and rocks. I may rethink the walls, but the fill is a handy stopgap.
I didn't see that one either!
Most of the underwater ruins in documentaries I have seen are ruined walls and statues with sand and various marine plants covering most or part of them.
Coral of various types in the tropics, but in cold areas there are fish and no coral. Barnacles might be there though. Or eels and wood worms.
Yes, ruins are the thing, but where this is a dungeon scale style I might have to make a range of ruined wall bits and pieces rather than drawing whole buildings.
Another decision I had to make early on was whether to try and do a bit of each (cold water and tropical water), or just one but with twice as much variety. At the moment I'm working on weeds and rocks. We'll see what I have time for after that ;)
Any way shipwrecks could be incorporated, perhaps in a follow-up annual issue?
Not in this style itself, other than a very small dingy or two.
Shipwrecks of the type you are maybe thinking of are more of a city scale thing - the size of a house, or several houses if you live in a country like the UK, where most people live in places that are relatively small. You could probably fit my flat, for instance, on the aft deck of a medium sized barque.
When the world gives you loads of noise at 4am, use it to do something useful and sleep later in the day.
How am I doing for colours, rocks, and overall appearance?
I really like all the different subtle textures of water against the sand and rock.
Thank you :)
Sue you are an amazing artist. The only embellishment I could suggest would be to add some understated surface ripples around the waterlines for items above water level.
Thank you pkfrye :)
I tried that already, but they cause too much interference with the rest of the map, being rather too eye-catching in comparison with the real focus, which will be the ruins on the sand below.
The wildlife looks absolutely brilliant Sue!
Not quite so sold on the geology yet though. The above-sea sand seems a tad too bright, and the white outline looks odd - as also on the surfaced rocks. I think I can see why you've drawn it like this, but actual rocks, and sand, tend to get darker when wet, if sometimes only subtly so, so the line (actually a zone whose size is determined by ripples splashing on the exposed surfaces, were they real) should be darker where the rocks/sand meet the sea.
The stacking of the rocks doesn't look quite right either. Higher rocks should lie at or within the outlines of those below them if supported by only a single rock, as anything else wouldn't be stable, and would simply collapse into a different pattern ordinarily.
Not sure if the rocks are symbols or simply drawn polygons however; if the latter, the stacking problem is easily resolved, and I'd imagine the water-line effect could be handled with an appropriate Inner Glow Effect. If they're symbols, though... sorry!
Thank you, Wyvern :)
I've never been further abroad than France, and then only twice when I was still quite young, so I have to go on photos like these, where the edge of the reef looks relatively precipitous. But it is a matter of interpretation.
https://somuchworldsolittletime.com/category/australia/coral-sea-from-the-air/
https://www.molon.de/galleries/Malaysia/Sabah/Pompom/img.php?pic=13
The rocks are symbols, and they were meant to be things I've heard people say are called 'coral mushrooms', which overhang like a mushroom at the top. I just haven't got around to making enough coral to stick all over the tops of them. I'm not even sure, yet, if I should build the coral topping into the rock symbol, so it doesn't take as much time to do the maps.
I decided not to get too involved with the inanimate objects while I still have the creatures and ruins to do, but I may return to the rocks and corals later. The main concern for me was to get the underwater to feel right by getting the right texture and colour.
OK, this is a bit more "tropical seas only" than I was thinking.
The coral overhang is, as far as I recall, only a thing with living corals, not the underlying rocks (which themselves are likely to be largely made up from increasingly compacted dead coral skeletons). The overhang will only survive as long as its own weight/strength and tidal action allows, of course, so collapse of unsupported areas is still liable to happen, especially when there are no longer living coral polyps there to help keep the whole "glued" together. As you'll gather, I was assuming the rocks were "just" rocks, not intended as the immediate substrate for living corals!
Keeping the coral symbols separate from the rocky bit ones would offer greater flexibility, certainly.
Flexibility is what is intended here. That's why I haven't stuck the corals to the rocks so far ;)
It would only take a little minor tweaking to the colour palette to turn this into a cold temperate sea - the colours being the controlling factor here. Red on the rocks is a common feature. reddish pinkish and whiteish forms occur all over the place. Maybe see these rocks as being particularly marine, and probably limestone.
This is what a change to the colour palette can do.
But the reason I haven't gone for these darker colours that feel more natural to me, living as I do in a temperate zone, it is much harder to see the map on the sea floor. (Apart from the fact that I forgot to switch off the distort sheet)
@Wyvern - take away the coral, leave the starfish and urchin, and add barnacles, mussels and limpets instead... do you think these colours would be a nice compromise for both tropical and temperate seas?
I've also split the rocks so that the underwater ones are darker, and the shore ones have wet sides.
Sue, here is a dive company down in Cayman I used to hang with back in my diving days. There is some videos and galleries (of course it is trying to sell themselves, and it looks like they now have accomadations nearby so you can roll out of bed and dive.). It might give you some ideas.
https://www.oceanfrontiers.com/
One that I had is for stand alone shadows on the sea floor for a few notable things - a boat, a shark, a whale, a large sea turtle.
I noticed you lessened the sharpness (not sure that is the right word?) of the white and black outlines of everything. The outlines don't stand out anymore and look more natural now. Your work on this is beautiful!
@amerigoV - Thank you. I will have a look at that when I get back to the map. Stand alone shadows can be drawn as polygons, or cast by the drop shadow sheet effect.
@George - Thank you very much. In truth all I did was adjust the colour palette and a few of the sheet effects. You would be shocked if you saw this map with effects turned off.
The rocks have always looked fine to me, simply as rocks. The colouring and texture would work nicely for pale sandstones through sandy limestones to limestones, but they'd also look good as pale granites as well.
The very white sand is typical of tropical-coral-debris "sands" (because it's composed mostly of wave-broken-down dead coral); I like the marginally toned-down appearance in your most recent screenshots for this though. That will work for paler sandy deserts too, of course.
REALLY loving the "damped-down" boulder edges now, with the softer edge lines and the nicely organic darker lower areas!
Water-clarity is going to be an issue for anywhere that doesn't regularly get calm-water periods, and also where there are regular amounts of finer materials (silts, muds, less mentionable substances...) being deposited into the near-coastal seas. So it's probably best to ignore that, and go with artistic licence/necessity. As this is a tool for mapping, simply indicating what areas are underwater will be a big help, even if they're not wholly photorealistic for all environments. Should anyone require that for the more variable temperate waters, say, simply suggest adding suitably coloured polygons across the whole underwater area, with a not-very transparent Transparency Effect, and classic muddy waters will magically appear!
Thanks Wyvern - that's good to know.
Most of the detailed stuff you mention is controlled by sheet effects, so it can all be adjusted quite easily.
The colour of the water is causing quite a lot of comments both here and on the FB page. It appears that what one person finds wonderful and perfect is a psychedelic and completely artificial horror to others. So to solve that issue I will include a range of colour palettes with the annual so that you can pick a theme and modify it if it isn't quite to taste. PALLOAD will access them, but to 'fix' them to each map individually mappers will have to 'Attach to drawing' in the Drawing Presets dialog.
There is even a brand new optional distort sheet that distorts the underwater scene as if it really was underwater, but this will be more useful for people more interested in the illustrative side of things rather than the mapping side, since it plays hell with the clarity of the map :P