Can custom transforms be used (in theory) to create a water ripple effect on a CALayer?

Question

It's possible to create custom transform matrices. But I wonder if they are suited for making water ripple effects on a CALAyer. Think of 20 of them in an animation. Can someone tell?

Answer 1

A CALayer is a single rectangular texture. Given that Core Image filters are unavailable for the iPhone (which let you do water ripple effects on the Mac), you won't be able to produce the effect you're looking for with a single CALayer. However, you might be able to tile a set of CALayers and apply appropriate 3-D transforms to each to translate and rotate them into a shape mimicking a water ripple.

For more on the math involved, you may wish to refer to this question.