Cruise Ship Bow Wave

The Client wanted to see if we could render a realistic flyby of a Cruise Ship. My Job was to simulate the Water and the Bow Wave. I did not think this was that challenging. But first tests showed we need to come up with something else. First I tried to simulate the Water around the ship with Realflow. But as the Animation length would be something around 2 Minutes and the size of the animated area is pretty big I faced limitation of computing power. 
The next approach was to use Deformers to animated the bow wave and use Thinking Particles to simulate the Foam. That was quite trick to achieve and I used a Spline deformer for each wave and some procedural Animation using C-Motion to make some variations of the waves quickly. The finished deformed Watersurface I exported as Alembic and used that mesh to generate Particles on the surface for the foam. 
the first test results where pretty good. Unfortunately we had to cancel the project before finishing as the Clients budget was exceeded before we could do the final touches.
What you see here is just the state of the project before we could finalize. I wanted to show this anyways as I think it was a quite interesting approach to solve the problem.