procedural textures

Never mind all that scripted noise mesh distortion, the animated textures will do the job perfectly. I found that using a noise in the material and mapping to displacement gives me all kinds of flexibility with the waves. The offset x and y of the map can be animated to roll the sea in whatever direction I want, and the z offset works well to change the shape of the waves slowly over time. I'll probably use the voronai f1 texture for most waves displacement, maybe with a long slow wave effect on top to swell the water as well.

These animated procedurals are going to be of great use in many aspects of the project. There's a lot of special effects, like the squirming slimy sea that will be perfect for this technique.

the rolling of the sea

First things first, we need to get the ocean figured out. It's basically a character in the story, so it has to be very flexible in terms of appearance and animation. I've created a pie shaped mesh that just fills the camera view and gets progressively more dense as it gets nearer. This way I can get the detail I want on the waves close-up, without wasting a bunch of polygons outside the field of vision. The material I'm using is very simple: basically a dark green solid, with some ray-tracing mirror and a bit of fresnel falloff so that we can see into the parts of the waves that are facing us. I've modelled a big dome of a sky around to seen how the reflections will work, and it's turning out nicely. I was hoping to do one material for the sea and just change the skies from scene to scene, but it's going to be more complicated than that to get the icy waters and the storms.

The animation of the water is also a challenge. I've done a few tests with Blender's wave effect, but there's not a lot of control over the shape of the wave and the effect is too regular to look right. For the above shot, I combined about 4 different wave effects and put some bump noise on the material. It works OK for some calm seas. I may try some animated lattices or RVK's on the ocean mesh, but that could be very time consuming. I'm hoping I can use the Terrynoise script ( http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/static/pub/files/tn-howto.html ) but I can't figure out if I can animate it using my mesh setup. The ANT script looks promising, but only works on a square plane, so I can't use it with my current ocean mesh.