# Is there a way to animate waves without using modifier?

As far as I know, bones can't do this and you need to go vertex by vertex to do it via shape keys.

Basically I'm trying to animate a wave. Where from left to right a wave of vertices would change Z location depending on time. It's really simple so me writing about it would be over thinking it.

1)

2)

1. etc.. wave moves to the end.

I did this by manually moving the vertices from point to point on the Z. I'm not looking to automate this, I just want to know, how do I make this animation into a trigger so I can animate like a bone or a shapekey?

I suggest using a material displacement node. The plane is UV mapped to the full UV space, so the top Mapping Node location of [0.5. 0.5, 0] moves the Wave Node's center to the middle of the plane. The effect is animated using the Phase Offset input. Like all good phase offsets, its range is $$[ 0:2\pi )$$. The Phase Offset can be controlled directly with key frame animation, it can be set up with a driver, or many other methods. In this case, I decided to make the phase depend on the X location of a control object. I used another Texture Coordinate node pointed at the controller object to get the object's location and then ran that through a Mapping Node set to scale the X location by $$-2\pi$$ or -6.283 so the controller object only needs to move between $$[0:1]$$ to get a full deflection.