Creating a realistic water animation?

Artich0ke

Does anyone know of a program (or photoshop plugin etc) that could simulate something like this:

http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=r28e84&s=6

it should output it as image files.. This is for an old engine that doesnt use shaders so i will have to rely on .dds/.tga images with a slightly transparent alpha channel.

Any help would be great!

GeeDave

Do you have access to 3d software? An animating ripple on a plane is easy enough to achieve (3ds max has a "Ripple" modifier, just animate the phase). Applying a transparent material won't work, but you could just give the object a grey material and render it out, thus acting as an alpha channel.

I don't know if this is a good idea actually... it seemed good at the time. I should probably test it before suggesting it, but oh well! I'm sure someone else has a better idea.

arrangemonk

what is the engine capable of?
cubemaps?, image seqences? multitexturing?

back in the blitzbasic 3d days i made a 'tilable' md2 as the water plane and applied a semi transparent spheremap + dirt texture

you can see here
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1484680/Arrangemonk_1264901543_3d-maze-game.exe
(also when opening with 7zip or winrar you can view the source files, including the water plane)

Artich0ke

It's for the Dark Engine (Thief 1-2, System Shock 2). It's capable of image sequences, cubemaps too. I guess making something in a 3D program (I use Blender) and save the renders as a image sequence would create the most realistic results. I was mostly curious if anyone know of maybe a program that specifically could creates animated water sequences.

I found one for creating water caustics (Caustics Gen) it work's pretty ok, but it wouldnt really be possible to make something like in that video.