Alt Tab Ocean & Water is a free Blender addon based on Geometry Nodes. It enables the quick generation of animated “ocean” or “sea” like surfaces.
If you’re familiar with Blender’s native “Ocean” modifier, this addon produces very similar results. In fact, it is an almost 1:1 recreation of the default modifier using Geometry Nodes. However, the addon offers some added benefits and since it it is available for free, it could be a nice and simple addition to your toolset.
Benefits of Alt Tab Ocean & Water over the default Ocean Modifier
Here are some of the main reasons to choose this addon over the built-in modifier.
- Quick ocean presets: the addon allows you to choose from 8 ocean presets with different sizes and wave patterns. This saves valuable setup time.
- Material presets: further the addon provides ready-to-use, high-quality water materials which work great in both Cycles and Eevee.
- Automatic Foam: the Ocean and Material presets in the addon include pre-configured foam parameters. All you need to do is enable the Foam setting and play with its options. In contrast, the default Modifier requires a manual configuration which may not feel intuitive to many users.
- Automatic Animation: the Ocean presets automatically adds a driver to animate your water surface whereas the built-in modifier requires a manual setup.
- Spray: both the modifier and the addon have a Spray option which is similar to the foam one but is used to create “spraying” or “splashing” particles near the wave crests for even more realism. Note that this is only achievable using Geometry Nodes, and the old particles won’t work here. Unfortunately, neither tool sets this up automatically. Here is a tutorial which uses the default Ocean modifier but the part about Spray is applicable to Alt Tab Ocean & Water as well.
The many quality of life features and “free” pricetag make Alt Tab Ocean & Water a great tool you can use to speed up the creation of ocean scenes.