Does anybody know how to make good water bump maps for calm ponds, lakes, and oceans? Are there any photoshop plugins or other tools to help?

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=101170

Water bump maps I think are done mostly procedurally using different types of sines and noise and fractals. Otherwise, run a simulation (there are definately shaders available for both 3ds and Maya and others, render to a greyscale depth map, and covert to a normal map in Photoshop (not sure how this'll turn out).

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Original post by Professor420 http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=101170 Water bump maps I think are done mostly procedurally using different types of sines and noise and fractals. Otherwise, run a simulation (there are definately shaders available for both 3ds and Maya and others, render to a greyscale depth map, and covert to a normal map in Photoshop (not sure how this'll turn out).

thats what i did, i ran a mental ray water shader and then rendered 1 frame out as a grayscale map then converted it to a normal map ( i actually did a parallax map because i wanted more depth but for your calm water a normal map should be good enough).
you could also make it by hand in photoshop if you want (a lot harder though).