I’ve been working on a water simulation where waves crash against rocks on the beach. The goal of this RnD render project was to explore how detailed water interaction can feel, especially when it comes to foam and spray. In this setup, the simulation shows how water hits the rocks and breaks into smaller particles, creating a more natural and dynamic result.
This was created or simulated using Storm HydroFX tool that was made by Sebastian Schaefer, which can generate foam and spray in a very detailed way. One thing I found interesting is how it uses GPU acceleration with CPU support ( hybrid system ), so the simulation runs much faster and also stable compared to most fluid simulations that rely heavily on CPU and RAM.
For this project, the simulation reached around 11–12 million particles, with a total export time of about 2 hours on an RTX 5060 laptop with 8GB VRAM. For rendering, I used Blender Cycles, and I also used Geometry Nodes in Blender to control and refine the water particles like foam and spray. Also I did a wetmap pass to generate a realistic wet roughness that was generated by the water simulation itself with dynamic paint. The final rendering process took around 5 hours.
This project was very satisfying to finish, but also really exhausting. Water simulation takes a lot of trial and error, and I had to run the simulation and export it many times to get the right result. In total, I reached around 147 simulation attempts just to find the perfect shape for the water splash! The whole process took weeks, almost a full month, but seeing the final result made all the effort feel worth it…
