[Texture/Flat] FWATER replacement

[Amuscaria]

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[wildweasel]

For some reason, imagining a Star Trek-style warp-drive core with that texture. (Or setting "additive" on it and making a dance floor/laser show out of it.)

[Reactor]

It's ready, and it's beautiful when animated. If you need them, I can upload the whole set.

And yes - they're paletted PNG.

[BloodyAcid]

Why can't you just upload all of the files/image at once so we can actually see what they look like? - instead of trying to guesstimextrapolate how they'll animate?

[NeuralStunner]

guesstimextrapolate

Please, never do this again.

[BloodyAcid]

Please, never do this again.

Yessir.

[Reactor]

Okay, if you insist...here they are:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/sg0mvt

[Enjay]

It has an interesting optical illusion where it looks a bit like the water level is rising/falling as it goes through the cycle. I have to say though, the animation isn't particularly smooth. There is too much change from one frame to the next IMO. This make the animation a bit jerky. With 24 frames, I would expect to be able to set the animation speed to something like 3 tics or less per frame and see a nice smooth animation as a result. These textures look quite chaotic with a short frame duration.

[Reactor]

Yes, I know...the result would be a lot better if there'd be a crossfading option between frames rather than just changing the picture, but that's the most I could do with paletted graphics.
Of course I can individually crossfade each frame, but then it'd be around 150 frames...

In fact, if you could make it so that the water surface is transparent, the little jerks in the animation is a LOT less visible. Or so my experience tells me.

[Reactor]

Hmm Enjay...and how do you feel about this? It's a heavily modified version & the softest possible animation with crossfading. It's more like heavy plasma than water, but of course, you can change its colour to blue or gray, and add transparency to make it oily water and such. As such, I had to break out from the palette, however, the graphics itself CAN be paletted, because it uses less than 256 colours I suppose. The size is 376×272, and the entire set consists 60 frames.

I certainly hope you'll find this useful. I simply can't create any better surface than this. Oh by the way, here his the animation itself, with purple colour. Too big to upload it here, but TinyPic should do the trick...for a time. Damn it, by the time I was ready with all 60 frames, my eyes were

[Enjay]

You haven't set the gif animation to loop.

That looks pretty cool actually. It doesn't look much like water (possibly oily water as you suggested though). However, it is neat for a plasma/energy field of some sort. I'm sure I could make use of it somehow.

As a matter of interest, why do you tend to make your textures in unusual sizes? Doom and Doom mapping is much better suited to textures that are powers of 2 (typically 64, 128 and 256 pixels).

[Reactor]

That's strange, it loops perfectly on computers. Hm...I'm not really good at GIF animations, so I didn't really know why it stops after one loop. Main thing is, this texture should serve perfectly as murky/oil water, nukage or something like this, and can also be easily paletted. Notice that this texture is also very similar to certain fabrics, whose surface becomes darker when you rub it, and becomes bright again after rubbing on the opposite direction (possibly velvet or silk).

As for the size, originally I planned this animation to be MUCH bigger (around 512), the unusual size is due to two factors: First I wanted to stuff as much different plasma "clouds" into the animation as possible to make it less repetative and eligible for wider-bigger surfaces. The second factor is much more important, it was the process of making this plasma seamless. And as you can notice, the plasma field has quite a lot of horizontal "stripes" in it, thus, if I wanted to preserve as much plasma as possible without chopping the beautiful plasma-cloud turning into another plasma-cloud, I decided that I'll only focus on the division by 8 rather than the shape to be perfectly square. This way, the quality haven't changed, and it's still divisable by 8, but the size is less regular. Originally I wanted a hi-res texture, but too many resizing spoiled the plasma clouds animation how they blend together, so I eventually ditched the idea and decided that 376 should be enough.

If you like it, of course you can use it to your hearts content, it's good even for paletted projects. As for me, I'll use this texture quite frequently throughout Tristania 2, mainly at otherworldly locations of The Blackwater Gospel, Down, Godspeed towards Oblivion, Star Evil, Dimensional Discrepancy and Cloud-cuckoo-land.

[Enjay]

As a matter of interest, how far along are you with making Tristania 2? It seems like you have done quite a bit.

According to Jasc Animation Shop, the gif is set to show its animation once and then stop. I'd post a fixed version but I don't think people on slow connections would appreciate me posting a second copy of a 3.5MB picture.

[BouncyTEM]

Simple solution to that. Fix it and give Reactor the link in a PM or something so he can update his post. win/win.

[Enjay]

Here it is thumbnailed by postimage. Click on it to see the full version.