[peq42]

Here’s a very good and short comment posted by user “-Angilas-” on blender’s reddit that I found recently while trying to figure out how to loop both the Ocean modifier AND its Foam in recent versions of blender(they posted a year ago, but tested on 5.1.2 just today and it works):

1. Create a Plane.
2. Add a SubSurface Modifier with 6 subdivisions (click “Simple”, not “Catmull-Clark”).
3. Create an Ocean Modifier with the desired settings.
4. Copy the ocean modifier(There’s an option to “Duplicate” it on the dropdown next to it).
5. Animate the Time and Scale of each ocean modifier to blend into each other:
6. So, for example, the first modifier could animate from Time: 20 to 40 and the second from Time: 0 to 20.
7. Then the first modifier will loop from Scale: 1 to 0 and the second from Scale: 0 to 1. (This way the second will end where the first begins.)
8. Make sure the first one’s Geometry: is set to Generate and the second one’s Geometry: is set to Displace. (You can set both to Displace, but this will probably require decreasing “Size” (don’t confuse with “Scale”)… and it will likely be a bit more unruly.)
9. Now, give each Foam Data Layer it’s own name in the modifiers. So name the “Foam Data Layer” for the first one “Foam 1” and the second “Foam 2”.
10. Now, fade between these in the Material Shader Nodes(Material Tab) by using two Attribute Nodes(Shift+A > Attribute), one that points to “Foam 1” and the other to “Foam 2”. Depending on your version of Blender, you may have to specify “Type: Geometry” in said nodes.
11. Animate from one to the other using the MixRGB Node(Mix Color). The animated Factor value should loop from 0 to 1. (Don’t loop from 0 to 1 to 0, your loop should complete between 0 and 1.)
12. Go into the Graph Editor and select all the curves, then set to Linear Interpolation (use the “T” key).
13. Then CTRL+Shift+M to add Cycles modifiers to all the curves in the graph.

This is important: It might not loop in Material Shading view, but if you did it right, it should loop in Render View.

I tested and it worked flawlessly! Though it did add quite a bit of processing time for each frame. Hopefully something that will get improved over time(or that can be tweaked with different settings and, if so, I’ll update here)

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