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I'm trying to create some soap bubbles/foam at the top of a liquid for a product shot. It's always been a tough subject to do, but trying right now to do it with Max and Particle flow.

Having some problems getting the particles to render so I'm doing it with geometry baked out of the Pflow - to the tune of about 3000 bubble shapes (shelled spheres with a really thin shell).

These spheres are all clustered together and are interpenetrating - which is a no-no with Maxwell I realize - but I'm less concerned with accurate refraction as I am with getting something that just looks good. This is not a very realistic foam shape (should look more cellular and not interpenetrating) but I don't know a way to get a more realistic matrix of geometry bubbles so this is what I have.

The problem is all that intersecting transparency is incredibly slow to render. Crazy slow (I have a benchmark of 1 ) Is there any trick/tricks that might speed this up? (all the tricks i know are dependent on biased rendering options).

Thanks for any tips.
b

Have you tried AGS instead of Coatings?

I thought in max there is now a better option with the newest Phoenix FD, which can generate foam without penetrating spheres iirc.

Else you could simulate softbody spheres floating on top of the liquid.

Rendering should then probably need Dispersion;)

AGS spheres scattered across the surface of an sss works ok for bath foam;

wow! this looks great eric!

Thanks,

No caustics issues with this one, because theres no direct sunlight to mess everything up

AGS proudly presents

Awesome Eric !!

eric nixon wrote:AGS spheres scattered across the surface of an sss works ok for bath foam;

That looks great! When you say 'across the surface of an sss" do you mean the bath water is SSS or the bubbles? Wondering if sss is how you got the bubbles to look white like that when using AGS.?

Thanks!
b

Aniki wrote:I thought in max there is now a better option with the newest Phoenix FD, which can generate foam without penetrating spheres iirc.

Thanks Aniki. Yes, Phoenix does have a pretty cool foam solution, but A) I'm wanting to do this project in Maxwell and I think the foam is Vray/Scanline only - I think it's a rendertime effect (pretty sure) and B) I don't own it - I just did some beta testing with it for a while

/b

Just a note: I was using AGS but had chosen the "clear" option, which sounded like the right choice. I am testing now with AGS "normal" and my benchmark went from 1 to 75. Still on the slower side, but a big improvement

What would be an appropriate use for the 'clear' AGS option?

b

Clear version uses additives. It's an imaginary unreal material which passes all the light through while also reflecting some amount of it back. Using it with foam could be risky about exceeding energy.

Ok - thanks Tom, I will avoid it here. What would it's actual purpose be though? Just cases where you want a stronger reflection than normal AGS provides?

Wow this is popular, I'll render a higher res version, then all will be clear, and the reason why the ags spheres are only intersecting the surface of the white sss foam object is too save my gfx card and render time probably.

Forgot to say I hid the spheres from gi.

Ah - you have a foam object, that explains where the white is coming from. Looking forward to seeing the detail - what I'm doing is very close-up and pretty hi-res.

Thanks /b