Research

I'm surprised that there is so much research on this topic, not just oceans but papers have been written on the foam generation! There is so much cool stuff and detail added to what could be relatively dull affair by the academic community, it's really nice to see.

There are a few articles that inspired me to look into this area of study, the first is a discussion on work done by Industrial Light & Magic (San Rafael, CA) on The Perfect Storm. They ended up developing an selection of plug ins which along with the real shots performed on set produced a breathtaking visual experience for the time and which still stands up today.

If you want to read the article:

http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2000/Volume-23-Issue-7-July-2000-/Sea-Change.aspx#.UaTcqpxO11M

Another interesting find was the work done of the generation of realistic foam, an entire paper written on foam and bubbles. The paper details the math behind the creation of sea foam, bubbles etc down to the level of each particle.

The Paper can be found here:

 http://cg.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/publications/2012_CGI_sprayFoamBubbles.pdf

I also went looking for blogs or other means to get information on the subject, and found many sources which referred to SIGGRAPH or Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, which is a conference held each year across the USA. The accepted papers are great resources one such paper is was produced by Miles Macklin and documented on his blog, the results of this wave simulation are staggeringly good, check out the videos.

Link to the blog:

http://blog.mmacklin.com/