I have created a simple animation on my water polygons using some nice looking textures found on the Morrowind Construction Set CD. It looks pretty good up close, but when I look above the water I can see the repeating textures a bit to clearly. The animation is repeated synchronously all over my lake, it look pretty strange. Is multitexturing the way to get this to look better?
Or is there a better way?
I will probably try to make som sinus waves sometime, but right now I would like to try to get the best result I can with my existing geometry.
I think using the High Pass filter might help if take my 32 animation textures an use them as detail(multi)textures, and another tileable texture as the main sea. My idea was then that I could move the main texture with the wind direction doing som offset calcualtions, and do the animation of the water in the detail(mulit) texture. It would hopefully look like the waves were moving in one direction(tileable sea texture), and up close you would see the water animation(32 water animiation textures).
If you go the multitexture route, make sure to rotate/scale one of them by some odd number (e.g., 31.2° / 1.123). This should help to hide the tiling quite a bit.
If for some reason you want to avoid multitexturing you can also try to change (sub)textures in a aperiodic way (see Aperiodic Texture Mapping by Jos Stam . It has a nice comparison of a tiled water texture with/without this technique on the last page.). But if multitexturing is viable that would probably be alot simpler.