I have been working on a Sea Wave Splash effect and I went through the Sony Imageworks papers @ siggraph and implemented basic or fundamental technique they used..... have a look @ the step by step videos of this effect
I ended up creating a wave animation cycle using a curve as shown in the video below
Then i decided to have multiple curves with an offset in animation so it has some variation and shape for the wave
Then i created a surface out of these waves using a nurbs loft in maya and got the below result
Then i did little bit of particle work by emitting particles from the tip of the wave......basically i generated a curve on the tip of the wave and emitted particles from that...
