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I have experimented with Blender before making some simple low poly landscapes.

I found this example online:

landscape animation gif

The scene I am trying to animate is very similar to the example above but a low poly mountain range. How can I achieve this effect?

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You can use a Displace Modifier and an Empty to move the coordinates of the Texture doing the displacing. This produces the "swimming through" effect. Use the Strength slider to adjust how subtle or pronounced you want the effect to be. Keyframe the Empty as needed to get the speed you want.

Displace Modifier controlled by an Empty

You can also change your Texture Type and Size to best fit your mesh density:

Texture settings for the displacement texture

Rotating and Scaling the Empty produce interesting variations on this effect. Play with it. :-)

One more thing: Here's another way to do it with the Empty coordinates using a driver, so you don't even need to keyframe. If you type #frame into an input field then the value will move with the frame. Then you can change it to frame/20, frame/30, etc. for finer increments (slower change). This method uses Python, so you can "Reload Trusted" or enable "Auto Run Python Scripts" in Preferences.

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    $\begingroup$ I actually completed it last night using the method you described but with two displacement modules with noise texture and interweaving the value to fluctuate. I like the idea of using an empty though, ill have a play! Thanks for the input $\endgroup$ – devchimp Mar 24 '16 at 13:39
  • $\begingroup$ Glad to hear you got it working! I added one more example to the answer that shows how to move the empty with a driver, in case you're interested. $\endgroup$ – Mentalist Mar 24 '16 at 22:32

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