Program for creating tile-able water animations

Community Forums/Developer Stations/Program for creating tile-able water animations

Makepool(Posted 2006) [#1]
Does anybody now how and in what the following animation strip was created? Basically the image is a perfectly tile-able animation of water flowing that also loops perfectly as well.

http://www.hidebehind.com/845864BC


I’m making a game where I require several types of water and if I can find out how this anim strip was created then I’ll be very happy indeed!


sswift(Posted 2006) [#2]
Search for "caustics generator" on google. It's the first link. But the web server for it appears to be down at the moment. Perhaps one of the other links has a downloadable version.

Also, there is a certain irony in a guy named makepool trying to make the caustics patterns at the bottom of a pool.


Naughty Alien(Posted 2006) [#3]
..I'm using Adobe Aftereffects for this kind of things..amazing and beautiful piece of software..


Makepool(Posted 2006) [#4]
Hmmm, the "caustics generator" stuff seems pretty interesting but as far as I can ascertain it's used for the refraction effect you'd get on the bottom of a pool rather than the surface of the water which is what I want.


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2006) [#5]
the refraction effect is caused by the water surface's wave depths. Basicly it will give you a pretty good illusion of waves on a simple 2-Tri Plane. I'd suggest to search for the best alpha and probably use a reflective texture on an additional layer.

You may also try my Texture Wobbler, tho it crashed on a few machines. It's also not perfect since it's using rectangular sinus-shifted copyrect to achieve the effect.


MadJack(Posted 2006) [#6]
If you can afford a small outlay

http://www.texturemaker.com

is an excellent tool for making animated tileable anims.


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2006) [#7]
It's indeed hard to impossible to find any good tiling water animation on the internet (surface, not caustics).

That's why I made some video recordings yesterday. I will now try to loop some sequences and make them seamless. More later.

EDIT - arrgh! It's not easy, really! I managed to loop a sequence, made it seamless using elias_t's code. Unfortunately in nature it's virtually impossible to find some waves with an equal brightness and contrast etc. over the whole frame width. There are also highly significant details. These things make the tiling very obvious when watched from distance, no matter if they tile seamlessy.

Furthermore, if the sequence wasn't recorded 100% vertically in topdown view (eg. from a brigde) then the angle of view will make it look strange when rotated (or watched from) 90 or 270 degrees.

It really isn't easy. By mistake I displayed the animated waves as a normalmap - wow that was weird. Try this at home: animated normalmaps - impressive.