A man overboard! Un homme à lamer!

[Ivaylo Katev]

the under water foam actually gives good look of the scene, if the fog color of the water is adjusted to make it visible.
the depth changes the foam amount as side effect, this is not desired but can't be removed. the depth is provided to control not the amount, but the look of the foam. it produces more underwater foam, as the name hints.
the min age is also provided to change the look, preventing the foam birth at places where the splash have no free fly in the air. but of course it's not possible to keep the total amount if the foam birth at these places is prohibited.
the liquid like option is for close up splash. you can see the difference in the images below, this option makes the droplets to interact with each other, like the real droplets which merge and split when certain conditions are satisfied. the usual values for this parameter are about 1-4.

[jstrob]

I saw those images in the help file about liquid like, but I tried to reproduce it and I can't. I set up a small scene with just a cube falling in the water and no matter what number I use for liquid like it just look the same like the first image.

And I think my redering problem was due to too many foam particles under the water and it was difficult to render because of the fog and refraction I guess. So hopefully I will be able to prevent this by playing with depth and min age.

[Ivaylo Katev]

this option takes effect when the droplets are in contact. the reason to not have effect may be low splash density, or small droplet size.
about the underwater foam and the performance - the foam increases the render times, but i believe in your scene the root is in the lighting and the materials. the foam configuration also plays role, however in the ship scene you have 50M foam particles and it renders in few minutes per frame. my very first attempts with splash were with similar foam count, about 2M, but the render times were 8 min per frame on i7. of course your resolution is bigger, but you have render farm as i understand.

[jstrob]

By resimulating I reduced the foam under the water but it is still a bit long to render (maybe 60% faster only but still hours by frame). But if I render each element separately, I get very faste render. Foam average frame 19 min. splash 6 minutes. water is now rendering but it is really fast too alone. I will show soon if the result when composited separately. I have to take a look at the ship scene to see why it renders so fast. And yes i have a render farm of 10 computers but in production I need to be able to output my shots in one or two nights pretty often.

[Ivaylo Katev]

some news about the foam rendering speed.
apparently during the development we have introduced some performance issues, and the last week we sought and fixed them. hopefully the fixes will be available tomorrow, you can try how this affects your rendering times.
btw, during the investigation i noticed that the ship scene was rendered without light cache, actually at this moment there was no light cache for the point shader. i'm rendering it right now and it renders with one minute per frame

[jstrob]

Ok great thanks. I should be back to phoenixFd testing this week after I finish some paid work.

[jstrob]

Here is another version (smaller drops, foam and splash)

better quality on this link:
http://www.phylacterecola.com/strob/...v007_small.mp4

[Ivaylo Katev]

looks much better!
the only disturbing thing is that the foam spreads unnaturally fast, like oil spot, i know this issue but here is too strong pronounced.
the underwater foam looks great, in many phoenix simulation that i have seen in the internet the people just ignore it.

[jstrob]

Thanks. Right you are right, the foam is not the most realistic. But it's still fun to watch. I will try to make it more realistic.

If I look at some footage like here, the foam is really more subtle spread slower and disappear very fast at the edge

[jstrob]

But this one has more foam moving faster at 0:28

I guess it also depends on how hard or salty the water is.

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, you can try to enable the direct birth of foam (not only by the splash), this will produce more foam in the depth
about the surface foam that expands too fast i see now that the references have similar foam wave, but not so strongly pronounced. actually i know what causes it. this is a water-air-water layer on the surface.