Script Snippets, 4: Very Simple Animated Water

Here is a very simple way to create rippling water for a pond or swimming pool. It uses the water textures which are in the Second Life standard library, so you don’t have to spend money uploading any textures!

To make this work, create two prims. For the sake of this example, I’ll call them Water and Ripples, just to make it easier to identify which one I am talking about.

Make them both the same size, and flatten them as thin as possible — they are going to combine to form the water surface.

Place them so that the Ripples prim is just above the top of the Water prim.

In the Second Life texture library, find the Waterfalls folder. Texture the Water prim with the “Water – ripple layer 1” texture, and the Ripples prim with the “Water – ripple layer 2 texture”.

In the Water prim, create a new script, and replace the script contents with the following:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | LOOP | SMOOTH | ROTATE, ALL_SIDES,
                        1, 1, 1, 1, -0.025);
    }
}

This will slowly rotate the texture.

In the Ripples prim, create a new script, and replace the script contents with the following:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | LOOP | SMOOTH | ROTATE, ALL_SIDES,
                        1, 1, 1, 1, 0.025);
    }
}

This will slowly rotate the texture, but in the opposite direction to the texture of the Water prim.

The result, to my eyes at least, is a very convincing rippling water effect. You have to look at it very carefully to spot what is actually happening.