An Ocean Lookout inspired in Wind Waker and done in Blender when I was still learning the program.
This is part of Grant Abbit’s Learning Series and it was a great one, everything is low poly which makes things much easier to understand until the point where we had to make the animated water.
The meshes have nothing more than very simple materials for the look and a couple of extra worned out details done with the Knife Tool. The ocean has a glass-type material made to look somewhat like water.
I added bones to the flag, hanging rope, boat rope, and shark for very simple animations. Then limited the skinning with Vertex Groups for the boat rope. And animated the boat in relation to the waves.
For the ocean waves animation I used a Displacement Modifier and limited the strength, then a Curve Modifier that controled the Offset property in a circle motion so that the waves could loop.