aluminum foam

[pipe_mm]

Hello

I am trying to get the look of this aluminium foam.

[pipe_mm]

my first test used displacements. but this gave to spicy forms and didnt represent the bubble shapes

[pipe_mm]

I am getting decent results with a more complex workflow:
- scatter bubble geo in maya MASH
- xport to 3dCoat (voxels)
- boolean substract of the bubbles from geo
- highpoly object gets back to maya

[pipe_mm]

now I came upon this new feature in Keyshot 8 named "density texture"

https://www.keyshot.com/features/whats-new/
(scroll down a bit)

does someone know how they approach.
displacement or volumes?

I would be very gratful for advice
thnx
Martin

[damaggio]

I think you were in the right track with displacement,you just need to paint a nice displacement map , the reference you have is very good so you can follow and tile while you paint.
good luck Martin.

[piotrus3333]

VRayClipper in mesh mode.

[pipe_mm]

thnx piotrus3333
I dindnt know this exists
will check out now

[dgruwier]

The type of shape you're looking for is voronoi. You had the right idea with the spheres, but you'd need to make them deformable soft bodies and inflate them so they filled out the space to get the right look.

There's a texture version of it in Maya if you pick the simplexNoise node and switch the noise type to "Cellular" (Make sure the lookDevKit plugin is enabled), although it's a very boring and uniform version with few options. If you search for voronoi noises or plugins you can probably find much better. Another keyword you can try is "Worley".

[pipe_mm]

dgruwier using voronoi 3D noise would be for displacements?

vray clipper:
I did some experiments with this technique
works pretty fine on smaller setups. sadly the rendering got really slow with bigger settups.
as there is no way to see and control the tesselation of the resulting mesh I was not even able to get a decent preview, for the renderer stuck.
nevertheless its a great technique

[piotrus3333]

I do remember this thread:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...-s-ratatouille
should give you a few other ideas.

[dgruwier]

Displacement or volume density or remeshing in Phoenix FD or maybe one of the plugins that generate voronoi topology. Just saying that’s the type of pattern you’re trying to make, so if you’re looking for tutorials or forum post or tools to solve this, that’s the keyword to start with.

[SonyBoy]

I agree that some sort of voronoi shatter of a volume would more than likely be the best way to start to approach this. I've had very good results using that technique to create a bone matrix in the past.