Using ambient occlusion to fake foam on static objects

[Steve Green]

Hi,

The topic of generating foam from static objects has come up in the past, and I finally actually sat down and tried using an ambient occlusion shader with black and white inverted combined with the trusty 'photo as foam' trick and it works pretty well.

Obv. if you're using the mr shader you'll need to comp it, not tried it with other renderers yet, and I don't think there's an equivalent shader in scanline...

So you basically end up with foam around the base of objects (you also get some extra foam on the ocean, since it is self-occluding - not sure if there's a workaround for that...)

Anyway, might help someone out...

Cheers,

Steve

[sitnisati]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for sharing this trick !
I know that many users will find this technique useful.

Kresimir

[Steve Green]

Thanks,

VRay users could use the Dirtmap - and it also has the option to vary spread by a map, so you could just use a procedural to break up the map, which you could animate.

If they're using VRay I'd also look at any distortion maps (like footools' Distort, or I think BerconMaps has one), that way you can distort a bitmap a bit with another map and give it a bit of life.

It's possible to take it quite far considering it's just a fake.

Hope you had a great Christmas and have a wonderful New Year.

Cheers

Steve