Recreate water texture in Gimp

Question

I found this simple tutorial on how to make a water texture. I quite like the look of the texture for the theme of the game I'm working on, but I can't figure out how to recreate it. I don't have the gradient that is referred to and there aren't attachments on the page. It looks like the site isn't used any more. I tried as many variations as I could, but I get way too many "waves" on the lava texture that are too thin and I can't find a gradient that works well. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the texture/gradient?

Here are the instructions given:

1. Start with new image of desired dimensions

2. Go through menus Script-Fu > Render > Lava, a new window will appear, select gradient named Horizon 2 (if you do not have this gradient in list, then download attached file, I do not remember from where I downloaded this file, credit goes to respective author. And if you do not know how to bring this gradient in list, see FAQs).

http://www.gimptalk.com/index.php?/topic/1778-quickly-create-a-water-surface-in-gimp/

Answer 1

You can download the Horizon2 gradient here - put it in your GIMP gradients folder - on Windows it's located at C:\Users\Your User Name\.gimp-2.8\gradients folder, then restart GIMP.

Running the filter as described in the tutorial works for me, but it only seems to work on small image files, I can see no way to scale up the effect. Changing the size in the filter results in something that looks nothing like water. I guess you could just rescale the result, although it will be a bit blurry, but since water is blurry anyway it might still look OK.

At original size

Scaled up 4x

Answer 2

Something can also be painted. Not so fine painting skills of course make the result a little clumpy, but it can still be useful.

An example:

A few white strokes are drawn. The thinning was created by setting "velocity tapering" on. It makes the line thicker where you draw slower.

I haven't any tools for painting more finely controlled strokes (nor skills to control it, if I had), but that can be faked with filters. Here Distort > Ripple is applied:

Because the image is quite random, it is useful to flip it to get the most dense part to the foreground. A perspective transform is used to make the dense part even more present: