Recreated the shader using only 3D textures. Here's an animated test. Still not quite there yet. I think the foam stuff is "living" too much (and I don't currently have any idea how to correct that).

(obsolete link removed)

looking nice
you'll get there man :D

Finally got the shader working the way I wanted. Not sure about the look though. Comments would be appreciated 'cause I've been looking at this too long :)

http://kotisivu.mtv3.fi/karppa/anim/tsoComp1_divx.zip (574kB)

Dude that is one kickass piece of animation. I love how everything just flows. Mist looks awesome. Who render intensive is this stuff?

nice kman now all you need is the lil rubby dingy floating around but looking real nice :D

Thanks roach. I don't know how long exactly it took to run the particle simulation and the hardware render of them 'cause no logs were generated for them. I just left my comp crunching them over night. The software rendering of the actual sea took 03:25:15 (hh:mm:ss) to render 300 frames.

Still not happy with the shader. It look too plastic imo...

It looked great! But you still need to work on the shader. The mist looked amazing. The animation seem like it was going in slow motion though.

Renamed the thread and started modeling fishing vessel which I'm putting in the scene (needed a break from the ocean stuff).

Just a small update.

Got bored modeling the ship. Went back to the ocean shader tweaking. Any better? (not trying to bore you too :))

Uh... suddenly I don't like it anymore... :(

It looks like it's made out of green moulded orange peel :(

stormy ocean "how to"
 

Are you going to post your work in the "how I did it" section? I would be very interested in that because I am after something similar myself.

hey Kbrown,
silviapalara has made a good point. I would love to see how you did it. I only know how to click on the make ocean button.

You might want to check out this thread which can serve as a companion to this one. There's an IRC transcript of kb and myself going through the physical setup of the waves.

Things are changing all the time. I'm still in the R&D phase. My ocean (the surface) is now completely expression driven and for example today I found a way how to have more control on the wave shape. I also changed the way the "secondary" ripple is generated. It is also expression driven now. So the thread NitroLiq mentioned is a bit outdated. The technique (the IRC transcript) in that thread works but it lacks control...

This has been (and continues to be) a fairly complicated, time consuming but rewarding trip to deep inside the core of maya (oh no, now he's dramatizing ;)). I feel I've achieved something with this project. I might write something out of this but as you might have already guessed, I'm not going to give this away just like that :)