Shader advice for beer foam

[prodviz]

Hi all

I'm looking to create the foam that you see on the top of a glass of beer.

I wonder whether to create all of the bubbles in geometry or go for more of a texture route.
(I'm using Maya or Standalone for this).

Any advice would be cool, cheers.

[riggles]

I've seen it done with a base geometry form and then the rest with the material. You could use a dense "chips" noise in bump for the bubbles, add a bit of SSS and reflection, and a small gradient for transparency at the bottom of the foam to blend into the beer.

[prodviz]

Cool, cheers for the advice.

Yeah, the circular procedural could be the way to go.

I could use this for displacement (will have to save this out as a texture, as Maya doesn't have an procedural displacement option).

Cheers.

[itsallgoode9]

if this is for a client project and it's a generic looking beer head you're after, I would just recommend photoshoping it on there from a stock photo.

another option if you use 3ds max, this plugin looks like it does an amazing job for beer. probably the only good one i've ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUtDPWDQPvU

otherwise, i'm interested to see what you come up with in your shader tests. i've never had any good luck doing this.

[prodviz]

Thanks for the link. Very nice effect.

I think you're right with dropping some photography in.
(I've done some R&D on the CGI bubbles but am not happy with this just yet).

Here's some beer flow R&D for the client:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/946 ... r_Flow.mp4

Cheers.