I had a project that I did in Lightwave a couple of years back. Lots of water--realistic ocean water with swells. Displacement mapping is probably the best way in Lightwave. I just did a quick test in Carrara. There are a couple of ways as pointed out already. One is with terrain. A good way is with the fractal generator. Then in Assembly scale the terrain down in Z. That worked pretty good. The other way is with a plane and displacement. Use a fractal noise or turbulence in the displacement channel. Make sure you use extra subdivision in the options. The powerful thing about this method is that you can use the "transform" tab and animate the texture center easily. This will cause the texture to animate upwards, or downwards creating rolling waves that form and then collapse. I have not tested it too extensively yet in Carrara, other than a quick 120x90 movie. But it appears to work identically to Lightwave in that manner. A little tweaking and it should be very easy to create rolling waves. In Carrara displacement mapping is done at surface level as opposed to geometry level in Lightwave. But I would also point out that Carrara's way of doing it at the surface level gives more options and control. Because in Lightwave you have to use a highly subdivided mesh to start with before applying a displacement map. Carrara allows you to adjust the subdivision from within the shader itself. Wish I had more time to experiment. I have a "hot" project for a client I am working on at the moment. YAY!! I get to use Carrara. But once I finish it I would like to experiment some more and post what I have come up with.