My apologies if I'm insulting your intellegence or experience with the following stuff. I'm not sure how familiar you are with Photoshop or Photoshops more obscure filter functions that the instructions reference but the tutorial revolves around Photoshop. Essentially, the author is speaking about creating 3 different grayscale/terrain maps using the original image that is created for the close-ups. The offsetting, scaling and pattern notes are simply to accelerate the creation of the following two grayscale images to be used as terrain maps. The 'orbs' with the greater density create an illusion of waves farther away when aligned as shown in the Tutorial. The offsetting provides seamless pattern creation which is then 'tiled' on subsequent 1024x1024 pictures at a reduced scale for the denser waves. I don't know if this helps :( The tutorial worked for me though. Good luck! Mark