I have been following this thread, and was going to suggest Fractal Voronoi noise, as it looks like it is coming to Blender soon, and would maybe give a ‘slightly less nodes’ solution to an ocean shader.
Yesterday?? A thread popped up from the developer of Fractal Voronoi noise to ask for some ‘real world’ examples as it seems the devs are in two minds as to wether to include it in master,
Oh nice! I think a combination would be great. The vonoroi noise doesn’t seem to have directionality, but adding it to a “base wave” would make a great stormy look, since it is nice and sharp. With this method, I can only generate nice regular waves that look like sinusses.
White capping / foam occurs when the peaks are getting very sharp, like the image below:
This is impossible to generate with only sinusses that are added on top of eachother, hence I don’t think we’re able to get good looking foam (yet) with the shader as I’ve currently defined it…
I have added the ocean modifier as texture in shader/geometry nodes as Blender feature request:
