Tutorial: Animated Water texture

[FxMaster]

Hia guys

A couple of days ago I asked if anyone could tell me how to make animated water texture, similar to the ones in Warcraft 3 and Age of mythology.

To my dissapointment no one knew, or was willing to help me out

Anyway, this afternoon I just felt like messing around with 3dsmax and I actually made a quite neat water animation which with some extra woork could get you some real nice water animation

The problem is still to get it to tile seamlessly, which I still don't know how to do... If anyone of you guys figure out how to make it tile seamlessly then please post a short tutorial here, thx!

And now to the tutorial:

1. create a plane, 50x50 segments and 200x200 in size, with mapping coordiinates.

2. add a "Displacement" modifier to it and set the "Use existing coordinates". With a "Strength" of 20.

3. add a "Wave" modifier to it and set the "Amplitude 1" to some value around 3.5, and the "wave length" to 40.

4. now add another "Wave" modifier to the plane, and use somewhat the same settings as the latter one, its up to you to add some variation. But this time select the "Gizmo" in the "Wave" modifier rolldown and rotate it a bit so that the waves come in from a side. Also move around the "Center" to get the desired position.

5. If you want, you may repeat step 5 with another angle for the waves...

6. Now its upp to you, what kind of water textures you usually use... I just chose a default material with some blue color and added a "noise" map in the "bump" channel. I choose "size" 10 and "regular noise type".

7. It's ready for animation now. I did this manually, by choosing a frame and then in the "Wave" modifier parameters i incremented the "Phase" parameter with 0.05 for each frame... 0.00, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15 with each frame etc...

8. Well, thats about it... according to me a nice water animation suitable as an animated texture for any real time engine... ehrm that is, IF you manage to make it tile seamlessly which I don't have a clue about.

Here is a simple example of what I did, loops somewhat seamlessly... but isn't seamless by the edges

animated water

Well, thats it... good luck to you all!

And remember, if anyone of you guys manage to make the animation tile seamlessly, then PLEASE post here how you did it.

And of course feel free to post any feedback
C ya!

(btw... if anyone is intressted in this, but couldn't complete the guide, then post a message here and I might polish up the tutorial a bit with some screenshots etc...)

[geoMan]

the texture can be improved a lot!....i am also thinking of writing a tut on making crispy and cool shaders in max!, i'll mention this in 3ds max!

[FxMaster]

Yes, I know... I just wanted to show how I made the Water animation... you can add a fancy texture as a material and do some other stuff to it...

I just chose a default one to show what I mean...

"6. Now its upp to you, what kind of water textures you usually use... I just chose a default material with some blue color and added a "noise" map in the "bump" channel. I choose "size" 10 and "regular noise type"."

And if anyone knows how to make a more similar water effect to the ones in Warcraft 3 or Age of mythology, then I BEGG you to post the method here...

And also If you know how to make the animation tile seamlessly then please post that as well.

thx!

[Michael Voeller]

ok, make two 256x256 or 128x128 bitmaps with black and white lines for waves, make them sorta diagnal and offset them a couple of degrees, and be sure to make them seemless. in max make a mix material and put your two bitmaps in there, make 2 keyframes and offset both textures by 1 in U or V or both if you want. now just use that as your displacement map, make another bitmap if you want for the color, and just for giggles offset that too.

tada, seamless animated water tile.