We modelled different sea surfaces for different wind strengths – for the higher winds we added ‘chop’ to the waves by dynamically pushing the vertices towards the crest of the waves.
This was done offline and stored in a big animation as we didn’t have the processing power to simulate it in real-time.
It used frequencies from the Phillips spectrum to represent waveforms found in deep water, which were then physically animated in frequency space using Fourier Transforms.
It was based on a graphics paper, Simulating Ocean Water by Jerry Tessendorf.