Animated swimming pool, with swimmers

[viscon]

Hi, we need to animate ~15 sec fly through of 5 guys diving into a pool and racing, and
are wondering the best way to to do this. It seems we have 2 options:

Use all built in Max/VRay functions; vray caustics, animated displacement map or noise
modifier for water surface, and manually place/create particles for all splashing. (which
we haven't done a whole lot of)

Or trying out Phoenix. (Real Flow sounds too burdensome.) Can Phoenix handle this kind
of object interaction/simulation? I know it can do splashing, foam, waves better than
we'd be able to with the above techniques... Is the learning curve reasonable?

Is there another way I'm unaware of? Thanks for any input!

[joconnell]

Paul neale's done some good water stuff with flex - might be a nice simple option too - http://www.paulneale.com/tutorials/flex/boat02.mov from http://www.paulneale.com/tutorials/flex/flex.htm

[wxyz]

Use proxies if you use Phoenix.