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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/

enter image description here

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  • Personally I use Solid noise for this, with different values for X and Y to obtain horizontal waves.
    – xenoid
    May 15, 2018 at 9:07

2 Answers 2

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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

enter image description here

Scaled up 4x

enter image description here

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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:

enter image description here

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:

enter image description here

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:

enter image description here

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  • Great example - thanks for the high level of detail
    – rphello101
    May 16, 2018 at 2:04

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