Hi,

Creating an ocean wave effect in 3D is not very simple if you want to let it look realistic.
I created a lot of realtime special fx already but I think you should not use particles for this one, because it just will be too slow to do realtime, because you probably require a lot of particles. You can better try to deform a tesselated grid. But then still it is pretty hard I think.

Anyway, good luck

John vd Burg
Programmer of Oxygen3D (http://www.mysticgd.com)

You can use voxels to create 3d water surface, but this have some restrictions with camera rotations and can not be accelerated with hardware (i think).

FlyFire http://codexorg.webjump.com

Well I wouldn't use particles to simulate waves. Voxels is a better approach, but still not quite realistic. About the BEST 3d waves I've ever seen have come from Environment Mapped Bump Map's which are supported in DX6 but the only Video Card which currently supports this technology is the Matrox G400, but I'm sure that will change soon. Anyway if you want to see some images of 3d waves take a look at the following link http://www.matrox.com/g400/3d_gaming/bump/expendable.htm

My problem is displaying a nice looking animation of some ocean waves (surf) in 3D. It would be preferable if the camera could zoom in and out and circle around the surf break. The system will probably be a great big particle system.
For this kind of rendering (millions of little low polygon, untexture mapped, objects) is OpenGL or Direct3D more effective, or some other API?

Hmm, from a 3D artist's perspective the way I would usually accomplish an undulating type wave effect using a displacement map on a simple grid of polygons. Perhaps something similar might work for what you're trying to do. Just a thought.

Oh, a displacement map is a grayscale raster image that works much like a bump map except instead of just perturbing the surface normal it is used to displace the actual geometry.