Waveform, polygonal?

Question

I have no idea what they call this so I'm not having much success with searching. But lets start with an example at this site:

Any idea how to make the choppy sea like wave they're using? I had limited success in Maya but I could work on it more, however I was wondering if there was a quicker alternative? After effects maybe. I had a play with trapcode but didn't have the results I was after.

Maybe there isn't a quicker way to do it in which I'll use maya though ^^

Answer 1

The fastest way to do this is to create a noise texture for a height/depth map and use it on a Terrain object or as a displacement map for a Plane/Polygon object. Here is a sample map that I made:

At this point you can use the app of your choice, Bryce is free and makes terraines out of grayscale images. For this example, and because this is a design question, I used Photoshop CS 6 Extended and the Mesh from Depth Map > Plane and create this object (after deleting Diffuse and keeping the auto-generated Opacity Map):

I then edited the opacity map and create a black fill and then dark gray lines, to produce this effect:

You can also turn off the Surface and enable Lines and Points in the 3D panel's Scene object to get this effect:

This may be an effective way for you to create this effect, assuming you have Photoshop CS 6 Extended. You may be able to do it with other version of Photoshop CS 3-5, but probably not as easily. I hope this helps. Cheers!