would be nice if a future release would interact with objects like floating objects, objects that fall in water and slow down etc.
Fully agree, thanks for the suggestion!
Oh wait a minute, you can put a mesh select modifier on the viewport preview! I wrote a script a few years back to do some averaging of normals to generate motion for this. I’m doing a boat crashing through waves at the minute and I’ll put up a script if I get anything useful!
Won’t touch what you mentioned about stuff falling in water but it’ll be animation that’ll tie to the movement of the wave surface.
Wow, neat!
Never mind, it looks terrible so far 
Just a question,
i`m about to start a nice project about the volvo ocean race,
as those boats a small sailing sport boats and pretty small, they will be not so heavy and therefore will be pushed around by the water forces,
i.e. wave is coming and the boat should be pushed also instead of just cruising through the wave with no movement,
as i remember few people asked before and thats the latest thread about i found, i thought it`s good to place it in here.
So any news, maybe nightly already, which has some features for this kind of in it already? Or ?hm how you guys approach that, link to surface or something?
Just thought i ask before trying dozens of stupid things 
Hey - nothing new unfortunately. You will have to animate the boats by hand for now.
D’oh! It was worth the question
You can use this lucid for simulation and phoenix for water since lucid uses nvidia flex and water is not good Lucid 3dsmax Documentation
but you will have rigid bodies simulated
Awesome! thanks for you reply Didn`t know lucid, looks very interesting, but would you mind shed some light on what you mean with “sim with lucid” “water with phoenix”. Thanks you so much in advance!
?h mean essentially bringing lucid and phoenix together in the end…
Thank you so much, effort is well appreciated! Big Up!
In the meantime i fiddled around with approach of the use of the conform world space as seen in this tutorial:
Pretty nice approach with the look at, i tried to adapt to a phoenix surface, seems to work but there is one thing, a logical one i guess,
i was able to conform those planes onto the liquidsimulator ocean mesh when there is no boat,
so just a simulation of the ocean surface with those planes conformed,
so i had the controlpoints on the wavy phoenix surface mesh, which is pretty cool,
linking the boat directly to those controlpoints to control the movement and then simulate again didn`t work, 3ds max freezes then,
(guess thats a dependencie loop somehow, isn`t it, when the waves are created at the same time while the planes try to conform and drive the ship…can`t work right?)
but then i tried to bake out the movement of those controlpoints over the waves and then link the boat to it and then run a sim looks promising right now!
Will keep you updated!
Can`t stop scratching my head about it, when u use lucid (still did not try it by myself) which looks a little like reactor or so, how do move the boat? Do i have to blow wind in the sails? On one side you want to have the boat acting freely in the waves but on the other side you want to move it somewhere.
MadCar is dealing with such a situation very nicely, the car follows a helper but you`re still able to drive the car somehow at the same time. …MadCar needs a boat modus hihi
HI Olika
yeah I am not sure about moving object forward. I am about to make a similar animation and I really dont know how to do it. Lucid is good if something falls into water I think. We had an animation not long ago where we needed a continuous pushing force for flying propane tanks and we could not find such kind of force.
Maybe you can rig a madcar on a bumpy surface with a bit of a low gravity and soft suspension like it is a boat and then phoenix will simulate water around it. . One time we made a madcar follow a path we created out of mesh like it is a train. lol
While I also support rigid body interaction, for stuff floating in or falling into liquid, I think even the “big boys” animate their boats and ships by hand, since simulating it completely will never give you enough control for art direction. I?ve done that before and even with my limited animation skills it looked pretty decent. What I would probably do different next time, is make a viewport preview of the basic wave simulation first, and then use that as backdrop to syn the boat animation to, and THEN run the sim again, including the animated boat. And then you can just link both and have them move around in the scene like batman…