Where Can I learn To Texture Water?

superdenny707

Can someone help point me in the right direction on how to make a water texture? I need to make a water texture for a school project from scratch, but so far I've only been able to find how to make water in-engine using pre-made maps. I'm looking to learn to make the maps myself. Can anyone help me out?

ivanzu

Sculpt a seamless texture inside the sculpting software and then bake the textures and set up the materials.Try looking into the polycount wiki.
Ps
Sorry for short answer its late here.

peanut™

probably take a look at youtube ? i'm sure they have tons of water texturing tutes.

Cap

What type of water are you looking for? Ocean? River? Puddle? Dripping Water with a scrolling texture? What textures (if any) are you limited to? Realistic or Cartoony? What is the end result you're aiming for ie can you do some procedural stuff in a 3d package or does it have to be real time? More info would help us help you.

JacqueChoi

It's a tough one because you're likely dealing with algorhythm's

And how those 'wave' textures intersect to make other water effects.

I think somewhere deep in the recesses of the internet you might find a whitepaper Crytek once wrote that shows all their water textures (although it might date back all the way to Far Cry).

Sean VanGorder

If you are looking to create a typical current gen type of water, you can usually get away with just one normal map for waves and do the rest of the work with the shader. Having the same wave texture tiling over itself at different sizes and directions makes for a convincing water look.

Orangeknight

Well I think this tutorial will help http://www.hourences.com/ue3-water-outdoors/
If you want to create your own maps you can easily disect these.

chrisradsby

Kinda depends on the water, making ocean-water is a little bit different than lake or river stuff.

superdenny707

Okay, so I guess I should have explained better. I'm looking and making the actual texture maps (Its supposed to be a texture and light class, emphasis on texture). In this specific case the water will be flowing in an indoor, man-made river.

I thought about sculpting, and it seems to be the most viable route to take at the moment, but I have no idea how to make it tile properly within Zbrush/Mudbox. I was planning on using the hourences tutorials to create the materials in UDK, but I still have to create the water textures myself (downloading his would kinda make me fail the assignment).

I may have come across harsh do appreciate the help

Xelan101

Import a plane into Zbrush.

Turn smoothing off in the geometry panel (to keep your borders fixed).

Go into the Transform tab turn off the X an Y Modifiers (or what ever combination restricts changes to up and down from the Plane's normal, depending on it's orientation)

Then go into the Brushes tab and turn "Wrap Mode" up to 1. This will make the brush tile back around to the other side of the plane (higher numbers will tile smaller, which can be really useful for starting highly detailed but repetitive textures like Bricks and what not)

Bear in mind you'll need to remember to turn Wrap mode on for every brush you use on this sculpt, it's connected to the brush only.

Also when using this method never use Smooth too close to the edge as the way it calculates itself will screw up your tiling, try using something like Trim Dynamic with low settings and a soft hand as a substitute when sculpting across borders.

From there you should be able to just decimate and export like normal, bake it down to the plane you originally exported and then (following any clean up in ZB or photoshop) you should be able to use this normal to follow the water tutorial of your choice.

superdenny707

That's awesome, thanks a lot! I'll definitely get started on this ASAP

ZombieWells

this should be no more than a 5 min task, especially if your just switching out textures in your shader. go to http://www.cgtextures.com/ , find a tiled water texture, (or make one using the "offset" filter in Photoshop.) generate your normal map with crazy bump, (I think its $50 for the educational version, its worth getting. You can also use the nvidia plug-in for photoshop). You should just need the normal map for this, but if you want to use any other maps, crazy bump does a good job of generating them.

superdenny707

I was actually trying to avoid going that route. I used to do that a lot until someone pointed it out on here, and advised me to learn to texture, rather than run photosources through crazybump. Since then I've avoided using photosourced textures for anything but adding detail.

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