Made a super simple no frills animated ocean. It’s nothing special, but it works for me.
I’ve shared it on my own website since I had separate issues with Gumroad (needed to register as a business), Blendermarket (minimum price and high fees) and Blendswap (which seems to have a spam problem):
One thing not mentioned on that page is that I wanted to avoid wasting a huge number of faces near the horizon, which I achieved with a custom tweaked static mesh:
The camera also fades between two different noise texture detail levels by distance… a little trick basically all 3D games use, but which I guess doesn’t make much difference in Blender.
Turns out, I couldn’t stop tinkering with the water so I updated the image in the first post.
I think it looks a lot better now and allows for greater artistic control over the color of the water (which I might have exaggerated a bit in the render just to show it off… there’s no subsurface or transparency, it’s all fake). It did require plugging in a second level of noise which slowed it down a little bit, but it’s still quite fast!
Also, bonus Cycles render (just note that you have to adjust the colors in the material to be darker for some reason):
Plus, also added calmer waters which reach 40fps in the viewport, and you can now see a faint shadow on the water at certain angles which can be tweaked too:
It did require plugging in a second level of noise which slowed it down a little bit, but it’s still quite fast!
