Looping animations?

[GarageGothic]

This has been bugging me for a long while: How do you draw "organic" animations like wavy water, rising smoke or fire so they'll loop smoothly (i.e. the last and first frames match up)? For example, how would you go about creating somthing like the rippling ocean at the Rubacava harbor  in Grim Fandango without a 3d program (or are there any freeware 3d programs that could do such animations to use as templates)?

[BOYD1981]

Animation Shop (which comes with PaintShop Pro) has a water effect that creates a seamless animation, you'd have to be very good at animation to create a seamless water animation by hand, unless it was a very simple animation ofcourse, but for now i'd recommend Animation Shop or perhaps somebody making some kind of plasma effect plugin that could be used to display a water effect in a game...

[MrColossal]

i can help with smoke if you want?

i'll write a quick tutorial on how i did it for Urban Joe if you want

[GarageGothic]

BOYD1981: Oh my god, I can't believe I didn't know about the effects functions (I always figured they were single frames effects like the ones in Paintshop, so I never even opened that menu). Some of the light effects are JUST what I needed for my game. Thank you so much for pointing this out.

MrColossal: I must admit that I haven't played the Urban Joe demo, but from the screenshots it looks quite cartoony. If you think that your technique would work for other styles as well, I'd love to hear about it.