Animated Textures (rippling water etcetera)

I am looking for some help in creating stuff like flowing water, a window that shows moving stuff, things like that.
Can anyone give me a clue as to where to start? Is it done via moving Gifs? Is it a script with several texture files?
I am not looking for some pre-made stuff, I want to learn how to do this.

Thanks in advance!

Iron winx

Look in your inventory, in the Library section. In the Scripts folder there you'll find scripts for waterfalls and other water effects. In the Textures and Objects areas are textures and some pre-made water parts. Search for "Water".

Essentially, 'flowing water' is a single texture that is animated to change it's offset in one direction, so the texture seems to be flowing from one side of the prim face to the other. This is accomplished by adding a script (AnimSmooth, I believe) to the prim. The other faces of the prim are usually set to a 100% alpha texture, so you only see the one prim face that is the animated water. Really good animated water is several transparent layers done like this, moving at slightly different speeds. The script is the speed control as well.

So, if you had a texture of water with a single leaf on it, you'd see that leaf move from one edge to the other, then reappear on the starting edge and loop.

There are also particle effects for water mist. Again, the scripts for this are in the Library.

Water that is "splashable" or that causes ripples as you swim in it is something else. That is a special effect also done with scripts, but I don't know how to do it.

Ceera is quite correct about one approach.

Another approach is one you hint at. The object contains several pictures (textures), and a simple script that rapidly switches from one picture to the next.

So, we have two approaches now.

One texture that moves by sliding or rotating across the face of an object. (Started by a simple script.)

Many textures, and a script (also simple) that flips from one to the next at some fixed rate

The actual images are either ones from your Inventory/Library, ones you obtain at some freebie location such as New Citizens Plaze, ones that you buy at a texture store, or ones that you create and upload from your computer.

Hi! When we can get in world again, if you go to my Texture Tutorials (Benten 25, 115, 2 there's a station that describes all of this, and also has the scripts you would need for using the Standard, Rotate, Scale and Smooth animations, and how to make the latter three ping-pong.

Standard Animation (the second kind that Lee mentions) are accomplished by taking a single texture, dividing it into a grid, and placing one "frame" of your animation in each grid section. The script tells SL how many frames there are in the X (horizontal) and Y (vertical) direction, and SL takes it from there.

So, for instance, if you had a movie with 12 frames, you would make a 3x4 grid, put one frame in each grid section, upload the file in .tga format, and place the appropriate numbers into the script.

Be aware, though, that with current limits on the size of a texture file (1024px x 1024px) animations are fairly low resolution. If you want to show something going on beyond a window, it might be better to use streaming content. I don't know; perhaps someone else knows more about that?

If you want to see more about the scripts, you can check that page of the Linden Scripting Language WIKI here.

You can't use an animated GIF in SL. However, you can translate an animated GIF into a file that you can use in SL with FlipperPA Peregrine's web-based utility here.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the replies!