Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgbBJjuDFJg

I was trying to create a water surface effect using a plane rather than the water physics simulation technique. I used shape keys and the wave modifiers to achieve this effect. 

How do I make it look like water rather than a morphing plane?

 

There are a few decent tutorials on this, but I can't find any using Blender 2.5. Still, the principles haven't really changed from 2.4x. Making a realistic water animation is usually done by animating normal, color, and/or displacement maps across a plane. In 2.5, this is done by creating empties and assigning the textures to "object" instead of "generated," choosing empties as the objects, and then animating the empties over the plane. 

This ocean tutorial on this page is rather old, but if you're familiar with the older interface, then you probably won't have much trouble recreating it in 2.5.

http://www.cogfilms.com/tutorials.html

Thank you Aardvark for the tip. I'll try it and see if I get the best results.