Here's a simply water solution you can do with a little tool I like to call Adobe Photoshop. And while I realize the purists will hate me, I tend to even do my pixel work in PS. Great tool.
Anyways, all you need is:
Top layer water.
As I realize that this is the part people tend to have the trouble with here's a mini-tutorial.
1. If you want to do what I did, create a seamless gradient backdrop. Like so:
2. Then just create a bunch of dots basically, also seamless (Notice I am NOT going to get into how to make seamless):
3. What I do is I take advantage of PS's abilities. I used the blotty layer on top of the big gradient layer, while lowing opacity of the black dots.
You could also just make it an overlay effect. (Check another of my tutorials, about an asteroid, to learn that one if you don't already.)
4. Tweak the colors a bit with hue/saturation, or layer styles. Or really any way you want to actually.
Tada. Again, the finished product:
Mind you, you could have done any of this without fancy layer effects. I would too if I didn't save so much time by just taking advantage of the software to make it convenient. This took less than a couple of minutes, mostly just making it seamless.
After doing this. Your going to want to use this top-layer water, which represents the light on the water in short, on top of a base texture.
I actually figured I had made my overlay a bit too large, so I shrunk it down to 32x16, while it was previously 64x32. Then I doubled it to fit to 32x32.
(This version I tweaked the color a bit to make it less outstanding as the next thing I'm going to show you. (I only need 1 really outstanding highlight)Lastly we have the other water overlay to move across the base texture as well, this will be our main visible highlight.
(It's turned horizontally so as to give some dynamic to the animation.)Now, we have the completed parts to create our animation. Your going to have to do a couple things now, if you want to do it the way I did it.
1. With your base texture, do nothing. But place the vertical water on top of it with a low opacity. (I used 50%.)
2. With your horizontal texture, place it top of both the base texture as well as the vertical water. (Must be on top of them BOTH.)
3. The horizontal becomes our main highlight through use of the layer effect of "Soft Light". The color will be subtle, the highlight pronounced.
After all of this. Your ready to animate. I will not explain this, but I will tell you what steps I used.
Simply, I moved the horizontal water, as our main movement, 1 pixel each frame. The vertical one, 2.
After the first cycle of the vertical I simply reset it back to its first position and repeated the movement downwards for the remainder of the frames.
After every frame of moving 1 over for the horizontal, and 2 down for the vertical, it finally completes the cycle at 32 frames. And now you have water:
This is at .1 per frame. It uses only 6 colors.
Slower and crappier. .2Feel free to use this for whatever you want, also. IF YOU CAN TAKE IT FROM THE GIF! HAHA SUCKA'S! No really, go ahead, it's garbage.
----------------- Tada? ------------------
Okay. Overall, it took me less than 5 minutes to do the water images completely finished, and maybe about 10 minutes of redundant tasks to animate it. Then about an hour and a half to explain it to you idiots, :P, upload the images, and thus reduce my highly needed sleep. Thanks a lot.
And there you have an easy water tutorial that has been done a thousand times. You could probably spend more time on it and make it better, whereas I'm done. Please don't bother people for water tutorials anymore, kay?
Ps: I uploaded all of this on tinypic. Which expires pretty quickly, relatively. So, yeah. Better save it if you want it to last.