Creating a convincing foamy, wet shoreline has always been a difficult challenge.  Historically in Vue, the way to create foamy looking water at the sea's edge was accomplished by using the "Distance to Object Below" node which required a lot of tweaking. With Vue 6 and its new layered materials and environmental sliders, the process of creating  foamy, wet shoreline is much easier and provides much greater flexibility. 

This is what we are going to create.  For this tutorial please download the following Vue file:

http://www.Skinvue.net/Tutorials/BeachShoreTutorial.zip

Unzip the file and load in the BeachShoreTutorial.vue file

To create the scene, we start with two standard, low resolution (256 x 256) terrains - one for the water and one for the beach.  You can make the terrains any way that you desire as long as there is a sloping V-Intersection when the terrains are brought together.  This V-Intersection needs to be lower in altitude than the rest of the terrain topology because we are going to use Vue's altitude sliders to adjust the materials at the point of intersection.  The terrains included in the tutorial scene file have this feature.

Base Water


Sea Foam

Edge Foam

The Foamy Water material consists of 3 layers:

Base Water - This is the base water material layer.  You can use any standard Vue liquid material for this.  I used the default Vue water and then lowered the transparency to 66% since I did not want to show any underlying rocks or sea bed in this example.

Sea Foam - This layer uses a small texture map overlay which adds foam and caustics into the entire body of water.  You could also do this with a procedural material.  The only adjustment necessary on this layer is using the Alpha Boost to set the amount of desired foam.

Edge Foam - This layer creates the foamy edge around the water where it intersects with the shore.  It is a simple milky procedural material with a slight amount of bump added.  To adjust the foam intensity, use the Alpha Boost slider.  To adjust the width of the foam, you need to play with the new altitude sliders on the Environmental Tab.  Adjust the top end of the altitude range to set the foam width.  Use the Altitude fuzziness slider to adjust the feathering of the transition. 

Sand Smooth

Sand Rough

Wet Sand

The Shore material consists of 3 layers:

Sand Smooth - This is the base  layer material which is a simple sandy material with just a slight amount of bump.  It is the material that shows underneath the Wet Sand right at the shore intersection so it need to be relatively smooth.

Sand Rough - This is the material which lies directly above the wave line on the shore.  You can use any material for this.  The altitude of this material should be adjusted so that it begins just above where the wet sand ends.

Wet Sand - This is a reflective material which creates the illusion of wet sand at the shore's edge.  Adjust the alpha boost slider for more or less wetness.  Adjust the altitude slider and fuzziness to set the height of the wet sand.

Now, just paint in some eco elements such as rocks and a few trees and you're done!  The eco elements will also help create better looking reflections in the Wet Sand material.