Minecraft Forums

Quote from roblitzmanguy»

I am using GIMP, how do you texture artists draw water caustics? I need that knowledge to make a water texture for my pack. I can't use any special algorithms other than making seamless and making a wavy effect, just pure hand-painted pixels.

Examples of caustics

If it matters, I'd like to know how to make medium-sized rings, about 6 pixels long.

The short answer is "draw what you see". This is, admittedly, really difficult with water. Of all the textures in Minecraft this one is seen over the largest flat area so any tiling is going to stand out like a sore thumb. Unless you're just naturally amazing, you're probably going to have a lot of trial and error work ahead of you. There's really no trick to it other than just observing water a lot. I'd even go so far as to suggest getting a video of water from somewhere and playing it at 1 fps just so you can see how it moves and try to imitate that.

My advice is make about five single frames that all tile well on their own and look similar to each other, and then try to blend between them. There's going to be a LOT of manual cleanup work if you want a seamless animation, but you CAN make something that looks good if you're willing to put in enough effort.

If all else fails, look at some water texture tutorials people have made for things like RPG Maker. Many aren't great, but you can at least get some inspiration out of it.

While I doubt that helps, I hope that it does.

I can't exactly give advice since most natural textures are the bane of my artistic existence (especially if they are heavily tiled and/or are scientifically specific) but this is the best lowest-res water I've seen:

Quote from Taiine»

I am failing to understand what you are talking about with the sand bit. The texture in game is partly transparent. It is not solid, so you can see everything though it as snown in the in game screen shot.

Ie the blocks you see in said shot, IS the sand...



Thats the water image with no transparency to show off the animation. You quoted the in game shot that does have transparency and you can see the sand through it.. so I really don't have any clue what you're talking about regarding the sand.

Also again, the ref image was taken from a swimming pool. I only wanted the water 'webbing' look, not exact color.

It is almost impossible it is to tile things well especially when they're animated. It only gets more complex with added frames (because hey, now you've not only got to worry about is spatially but also chronologically) unless you're doing a pseudo-random thing. Taiine didn't do so bad, but hasn't been online since late June so isn't here to give any advice on the matter

I'm not even sure if that's 32x (like the actual image is) or if it's 16x and just upscaled for visibility (and then blurred because browsers do that) but my advice was gonna be 'cheat by using a higher res' anyways... although I would suggest 24x (x1.5 res instead of x2 res that is 32x) so a bit smaller of an impact and visual difference.

EDIt: Accidentally some words at the beginning.