Hi,
I am not a texture artist and never did game art before. I am just asking this out of curiosity.
I am wondering how developers create animated normal textures for water rendering and animated textures for explosions and other realistic particles effects.
Thanks

Animated water is often done by combining two or more normal maps in a shader. Particle animation are often many frames which will be played back when rendered. I.e. you could use a 3d texture to save an animation of 64 frames of an explosion and you could easily play it back by altering the third texture coord over time.

Hi,
I already programed water shader using reflection and refraction etc. Currently I am just using placeholder textures from other games.
I am asking how these textures are created by the artist. How do they create these textures. What kind of tools do they use?

Photoshop and a digital camera.

Hi,
I need more details, how is animated water normal texture created by an artist?

Hi,
I need more details, how is animated water normal texture created by an artist?

Sculpt it, or make a heightmap in photoshop + convert to normal map, or whatever other tricks the artist knows for making normal maps

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=water+"normal+map"

or whatever other tricks the artist knows for making normal maps[/quote]
It's those tricks he wants to find out 

This is the only tool I know that generates seamless water texture animations automatically, be it reflectively-colored or normal-colored: http://www.holzchopf...?category=tools