Foam looks "dirty"

[mr_pablo]

I am issues trying to make foam look like foam.

I'm making my own boat and ocean sim, and whilst I'm getting closer and closer to a decent "wake", the foam renders horribly.

With VRay Sun, the foam looks dirty and flat (despite there being a ton of foam particles in the viewport.

With no lights, the foam simply doesn't appear.

I've attached two images. One showing the foam in the viewport, the other the render (with sun) of that frame.

http://imgur.com/a/XOgA5

Other then the boat example file, does anyone have tips on how to get a decent looking wake? My boat is a big cargo ship, about 340m long, so I want a nice long trail behind it, and trails that come from the front and go along the side.

[oophus]

On the particle shader, there is something called diffuse contribution or something like that. You can up that. You can also play abit with the ior setting.

[mr_pablo]

Bumping up the Diffuse multiplier helped a lot. It was really low previously. Any idea how to get it to last longer and spread out over time?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

I think you need more Half Life and watch out for the foam not to leave the simulator too soon. However I'm worried about the way the render looks - are these shapes the edges of the liquid mesh? What is your grid resolution?

[vlado]

I think you need more Half Life...

Now that's a good recommendation

Best regards,
Vlado

[mr_pablo]

I think you need more Half Life and watch out for the foam not to leave the simulator too soon. However I'm worried about the way the render looks - are these shapes the edges of the liquid mesh? What is your grid resolution?

My boat is moving in a line some distance, meaning the wake would be quite long. Is the only way to have the wake foam stay visible to have a large sized simulator box?

Or is there a way to have foam stay outside the sim box?

As for the grid resolution in these shots, it was very low, as my sim box is so big. The particle size was about 3m or so. I understand such large particles give a totally different look to smaller ones, but does particle size also affect splashes and foam generation?

My foam half life is set to 10 currently. Is that seconds? Definitely needs to be longer then 10 seconds :P

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, that's in seconds - be sure to increase the Outside Life as well if you intend to have the foam... out of the box You might try to go with a smaller box first, but in case the foam starts acting weird, you might need to make the box larger.

Cheers!