The rapid modeling and controllable animation of large scale water surface and waves have always been hot issues in computer graphics research. However, due to the complexity and irregularity of natural waves, the existing simulation methods of waves cannot make a good tradeoff between computational efficiency and realism. In this paper, a technique is presented to extract features of the wave shape and generate controllable wave animation rapidly. Taking the captured video of outdoor costal wave as input, this technique first uses mathematical morphology algorithms to resolve wave's mask and skeleton from water video sequences as wave's features. Then it employs these features to control the shape of waves by reusing of height field to generate various wave animations. Consequently, the new method can produce controllable swell wave moving patterns under simple interaction with a small computational cost. Experiments show that the presented method can generate natural wave deformation effect with a simple and intuitive control process.