OK, so I’ve been working on this on and off for a while now, it’s a bit of a nightmare for my current computer to handle, both a heavy mesh and high res textures.
I suppose I wanted to see what you guys thought, if you like it I might be more motivated to return to it. The ideas I have for the scene are way out of scope for this PC but hopefully I’ll get something better soon.
pretty solid so far, what is your idea in the end?
I’m just kinda going with the flow at the moment. But the basic idea is for a shanty town that looks “lived in”, so to speak. I’m trying to improve my texturing and combine them with PBR dirt and rust shaders.
At the moment the dirt is a little random perhaps, rather than congealing around specific/logical areas.
I have a better computer now so I can come back to this project without it frustrating me. There’s a lot of stuff that will require work.
Any tips on making realistic dirty/foam for the edges of the water, and around partially submerged objects would be welcomed. Something a bit like this perhaps.
Foam can be generated with the ocean modifier, but I don’t think you’ll have much control over it. You’ll probably want to use noise facs to mix the water shader with a diffuse/translucent foam shader for the general foam.
And for the raised foam, displacement. Since performance is a concern you may want to use a separate plane to avoid having to further subdivide the water because things may get slow.
Here is a quick node setup to get you started:
It’s a cube, a water plane, and a foam plane below it. For this work the foam plane needs an adaptive subsurf modifier and displacement set to “Displacement Only”.
In this example I used the cube origin to control the alpha because I’m lazy. The foundation of the alpha is a simple circular mask, so it won’t play well with objects of certain shapes nor will help with the water edge. You’ll want to handpaint a black-and-white mask to control it instead.
I also advise to replace the diffuse shader with a Principled one with transmission/SSS or a translucency mix to make it look really good. Also note part of the foam sits underwater and part doesn’t because it’s a flat plane. You’ll have to experiment and decide whether you’ll want to replicate part of water deformation, or use it directly in the water plane, etc so this doesn’t happen.
I hope this helps! 
Hey great brib thanks, sounds tricky but hopefully I’ll get some time to try this later today.
