I want to model & animate something like this: http://stereolize-design.deviantart.com/art/Boat-Information-Screen-1-156243871 (image on far right)
Basically a cube with a displaced noise surface at the top. The cube should have sharp edges, so I was thinking maybe fluids aren’t the best solution, but I’m not sure. Any advice? Thanks.
You can use fluids and move the camera out of the domain. That gives the box look. Or use a cube dynamic paint to make the waves.
A fluid simulation won’t give you sharp edges. Dynamic paint can give you waves but they won’t be as good as the Ocean simulation. Here comes the crazy idea…
A simple cube and a boolean intersection with an ocean simulation. You make the cube tall enough to make sure the waves don’t go over the top and small enough so that the limits of the ocean always stay outside of the cube during the animation. You hide the ocean (and switch off its renderability too.) Done!
Just expect the whole process to be quite CPU intensive… No real time animation. But, on the other hand, it shouldn’t be too hard to texture a simple cube. 
Thanks, guys.
By “no real time animation” do you mean it doesn’t even change from frame to frame in the editor? Because I can’t seem to get the mesh to change after the boolean operation. Maybe I did it wrong…great tip though.
The boolean operation is visible only in Object mode. As usual, with a modifier, you must activate the display if you want to see more than the original shape in Edit mode… Well, except that the Boolean modifier has no option to see the modified mesh in Edit mode. 
Any way, it wouldn’t be much useful to see the mesh resulting from a boolean with a dynamic animation. There’s nothing for you to edit. The Default cube is all you need to unwrap… altho I wouldn’t even bother and use a pure procedural material in Cycles, like glass with absorption.
If you really insist on seeing the modified mesh, apply the Boolean modifier… Of course, you’ll lose the animation in the process.
Sorry, by “mesh change” I mean I thought I would see the ocean portion of the boolean animate from frame to frame.
You can see the animation. I do. Blender plays the animation very slowly… but it plays! And scrubbing the time line works too.
OK, cool! I’ll have to try again then. Not sure what I did wrong. Thanks.
Stupid question… Did you animate the Time parameter of the Ocean modifier? If not, well, the ocean won’t move…
Working values: Frame 1, Time 1.0. Frame 100, Time 5.0.
Reminder: Mouse over the value and press [I] to insert a keyframe at the current frame.
