Not your father's water animation

[Chilton]

I need to make a water animation in Flash. It needs to look like the view of water if you're looking down into water from the side of a ship or dock. Much like the water on the right side of the Listerine commercials they're airing now, or the water on the left side of the configuration screen for MacOSX.

I am NOT interested in ripples, puddles, dollyps, schlemolios, or faboscha water effects. We're talkin hardcore water here, folks. Any ideas?

Preferably I'd like some simple mathematical formula I slept through in my engineering classes, but combo MC/tweens and such are fine.

The person who figures this out will be dubbed "smartest dood on the web" for a period of not less than one week.

Thanks,
-Chilton

[pixelwit]

I haven't seen the Listerine commercial nor do I use a Mac, but it sounds like you're going to have to ditch vectors and head on over to the world of raster images.

1) get a videocamera and head to the beach. You can't beat reality for realism.

2) If you're nowhere near real water, render some. 3D apps like Bryce can do water fairly easily and even animate it if I'm not mistaken.

3) Snap a picture of real water rippling. Divide that image into overlapping pieces with faded edges. Animate each piece in a "bobbing" sequence.

4) In Photoshop render some clouds (or something similar) using transparency. Then try overlapping a variety of colored transparent images and wiggling them around a bit.

Maybe it'll help,

-PiXELWiT
http://www.pixelwit.com