Animated Water Normal Map (Tileable, Looped)

Cebbi · August 6, 2016, 8:46am

Hello guys,

I recently created a water normal map animation in blender. It is seamlessly tileable and looped and consists of 120 frames with 1024x1024 px each.

Here’s a video of the normal map in action:

And a render using only one frame:

It makes rendering scenes with water much faster and keeps the viewport smooth, because no geometry is needed.
It’s a huge time saver, but it took a few hours to render the 120 normal maps.
That’s why you can download it for free on textures.pixel-furnace.com.

Creating it yourself:

If you want to render it yourself, I recommend this technique by Haunt_House to create the geometry: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2858/how-to-create-a-seamlessly-looping-ocean
Remember to displace only on Z-axis and use a tiled ocean modifier.

To render the normal maps, use the Normal pass with the following correction:

(The gray colors are R:0.5 G:0.5 B:0.5)

Have fun.

Edit:
I created a short tutorial video that explains way more detailed what to do. Watch it with captions for instructions.

garbagegiraffe · August 6, 2016, 2:02pm

wow thats frikin beautiful

Margenta · August 6, 2016, 10:47pm

Thank you very much! It is a very useful contribution to the community

jim_trim · August 7, 2016, 12:21am

Wo, thanks!! Look forward to having a play with this and giving that method a go myself for water in the future. Novel approach:) thanks.

Cebbi · August 7, 2016, 8:03am

Thanks for the kind words.

I added a Video tutorial to the first post, if you want to recreate it.

D.T.G · July 19, 2018, 2:23pm

Would you mind putting the full resolution Normal Map in your post for those who can’t access the link?

Cebbi · July 19, 2018, 2:40pm

Hi, I forgot about this post when I moved and improved the website. The water texture is now on textures.pixel-furnace.com (easy to find, will probably always be the most downloaded texture). I updated the links in the first post now.

Idle_Eyez · July 19, 2018, 3:59pm

This is awrsome. Thank you kindly

D.T.G · September 12, 2018, 1:29pm

For some reason I can’t access this website. Could show the picture like this one?

Cebbi · September 12, 2018, 2:59pm

What does it say? Seems fine for me, but maybe I can fix it.

Here is the first frame of the first water texture and another one with stronger waves.

D.T.G · October 19, 2018, 8:37am

Could you compile these normal maps into a sprite sheet? I am working on a game in blender, but I need an ocean. A sprite sheet would be a great help.

Cebbi · October 19, 2018, 10:12am

That would be a pretty huge sprite sheet. 11x11 frames with 1024px each -> 11K texture. I’m not sure if you want that, but I walso don’t know how to combine all frames into a sprite sheet, apart from placing them by hand, sorry.

Romanji · October 19, 2018, 11:34am

I found this tool a couple of years ago that could do that:

Also, thanks for the water…