3Ds Max: Water question

Armageddon

I'm making an intro for my game where your ships wrecks and you're stranded in an ocean. The problem is I'm using an engine that doesn't have very good water (Source) so I was thinking of making an animated model for the water. I don't know how to make a water effect in 3Ds Max, much less animating the waves. I'd really like something similar to this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoYorK3E4aM&feature=player_detailpage#t=54s
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/595848151502571881/92CF80D46FE1C26631A32816CCE13B45D3539620/
I'd just really like a push in the right direction on how to make this. Thanks.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

And if you want water as good as that Bioshock video then you've got your work cut out for you.

It has an animated mesh (you could do this with a vertex shader or using animated verts if the engine supports it, or using engine code if you can script your verts, and probably a bunch of other ways I'm not thinking of) and the shader is creating opaque foam as well as textured water waves and ripples and colour.

If you can write a vertex shader then that'd be an easy way to ripple the mesh, though the quality would be very dependent on the flow of the polys. You can offset each vert using a number of layered sin waves.

Armageddon

Source does support vertex shaders and animated verts. I'd much rather do the latter though because I need control over the waves. I looked at RealFlow for 3Ds Max but the water doesn't look like it works well for oceans.