Normal Maps for Water surfaces?

Visceral

After much trial and failure i havent gotten the hang of making normal maps for water surfaces. And searching the web dosnt yield any helpful results.

So i wonder, how would you go about making something like this?

As far as i know there is 2 methods.
1): Make a complex noise texture and bake a normal from that via crazybump ndo2 whatever.
This is the method im using, and it lacks alot of the control i look for. It becomes very noisy and looks moore like rock rather than waves.

This is the kinds of results im getting using that method:


2): Sculpting?
This is the method im intrested in. Is it possible to do in zbrush or mudbox? If so, what toold should i look for?

Fwap

Can you show some images of the result your looking for?

Water normals are usually a combination of a few normal maps moving in different directions.
Whether or not you are using UDK/UE4 for this, you can see the normals he uses for his water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qyQMJN4WrU

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=voronoi+noise&safe=off&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=QPuLU8-NHISPkAXXloGADQ&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=643#q=water+normal+map&safe=off&tbm=isch
They all kind of look like rock normals, its what you do with them that defines the texture i suppose.

Grindigo

Try using clouds filter in photoshop it should be tileable right off the bat then you can generate normal map from it using nDo and tweak how you want it, make sure it's quite noticeable, not muddy flat, you want as much shading information there is.

Joost

I haven't tried this myself, but theoretically you could use Realflow( I think there's a trial?) to generate a normal map. Which can be animated or not. They should tile by default. I'm not sure if you can render normal maps straight out of Realflow but you can render displacement maps without any problem.

It will take a while to familiarise yourself with the program but you'd probably get the most realistic results with RF.