From BlenderWiki

Wave Modifier

Description

The Wave modifier adds an ocean-like motion to the Z coordinate of the object’s vertices/control points. This modifier is available for meshes, lattices, curves, surfaces and texts, with a few restrictions for non-mesh objects:

• Activating Normals or typing a name in VGroup will then simply deactivate the modifier.
• Even worse, selecting UV as texture coordinates will make Blender crash at once!

Options

Wave modifier panel.

Linear wave front.

Circular wave front.

This panel is found in the Editing context (F9), Modifiers panel, selecting Wave as the modifier.

X and Y

The wave effect deforms vertices/control points in the Z direction, originating from the given starting point and propagating along the object with circular wave fronts (both X and Y activated), or with rectilinear wave fronts, then parallel to the axis corresponding to the X or Y button activated.

Cycl

Repeats the waves cyclically, rather than a single pulse.

Normal – Meshes only!

Displaces the mesh along the surface normals (instead of the object’s Z-axis).

Time sta

The frame at which the wave begins (if Speed is positive), or ends (if Speed is negative). Use a negative frame number to prime and pre-start the waves.

Lifetime

The number of frames in which the effect lasts. 0 means forever…

Damptime

An additional number of frames in which the wave slowly dampens from the Height value to zero after Lifetime is reached. The dampening occurs for all the ripples and begins in the first frame after the Lifetime is over. Ripples disappear over Damptime frames.

Sta X and Sta Y

The starting point of the waves, in the object’s local coordinates.

Ob

Use another object as reference for starting position of the wave. Leave blank to disable. Note that you then can animate this object’s position, to change the waves origin along time…

VGroup – Meshes only!

A vertex group name, used to control the parts of the mesh affected by the wave effect, and to what extent (using vertex weights).

Texture

Use this texture to control the object’s displacement level. Animated textures can give very interesting results here…

Texture Coordinates

This menu lets you choose the texture’s coordinates for displacement, between Local, Global, Object (which adds an additional Ob field just below, to type in the name of the object from which to get the texture coordinates), and UV (which adds an extra UV Layer drop-down list, where to select the UV layer to be used – warning: do not activate this options with non-mesh objects, it seems to make Blender crash at once!).

Speed

The speed, in BU (for “Blender Units”) per frame, of the ripple.

Height

The height or amplitude, in BU, of the ripple.

Width

Half of the width, in BU, between the tops of two subsequent ripples (if Cycl is enabled). This has an indirect effect on the ripple amplitude – if the pulses are too near to each other, the wave may not reach the 0 Z-position, so in this case Blender actually lowers the whole wave so that the minimum is zero and, consequently, the maximum is lower than the expected amplitude. See technical details below.

Narrow

The actual width of each pulse, the higher the value the narrower the pulse. The actual width of the area in which the single pulse is apparent is given by 4/Narrow. That is, if Narrow is 1 the pulse is 4 units wide, and if Narrow is 4 the pulse is 1 unit wide.

Technical Details and Hints

The relationship of the above values is described here:

Wave front characteristics.

To obtain a nice wave effect similar to sea waves and close to a sinusoidal wave, make the distance between following ripples and the ripple width equal, that is the Narrow value must be equal to 2/Width. E.g. for Width=1, set Narrow to 2.