Easy Foam

A realistic foam rendering system with multiple presets and support for custom meshes

Product video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XK6_GCu1jxaUZPU-aaXLX7a7kxEPtm8T/view?usp=sharing

Easy Foam is a system for realistic rendering of foam and bubbles in Unreal Engine.

Driven by Blueprints, foam actors can be interactively placed and shaped in the editor using static meshes which seamlessly merge together and with multiple presets to achieve plausible results straight out of the box.

Easy Foam is more than just a transparent material, it brings offline rendered foam quality to Unreal Engine by rendering foam in multiple passes. Therefore, currently the tool targets high-end platforms and cinematics. It is not suitable for mobile platforms.

Easy Foam offers two modes:

・Thin mode (2D) – suitable for placing thin layers of foam on objects, liquids

・Thick mode (3D) – suitable for turning entire meshes into foam

The thick foam mode works in world space, which means no UVs are necessary and there will be no visible seams or tiling artifacts.

Presets:

1. Beer foam

2. Coffee foam

3. Cola foam

4. Milk foam

5. Tea foam

The presets can be used as a starting point to create custom foam presets by adjusting foam properties, bubble layers etc.

Easy Foam offers a reasonable approximation balancing quality and performance by placing emphasis on realistic rendering of larger bubbles while simplifying smaller bubbles. This makes it suitable for hero assets in games and for use in cutscenes. Easy Foam can also be used for visualization and product shots with a completely procedural Cinematics mode, removing texture resolution constraints.

Technical Details

Features:

Realistic modeling of foam: at far to close distance with individual bubbles visible
2D and 3D foam: supports various mesh types, even without UVs
Procedural shading: density/scale sliders, shading controls and detailed five-layer bubble controls
Displacement: detailed bubble silhouettes when seen from the side (requires high mesh density)
Full dynamic lighting: supports Lumen and dynamic lights, combine with daylight system or IBL
Art direction: use vertex colors to paint foam or fine-tune bubble scale/amount
Scalability: Render quality settings are provided to switch between in-game and cinematic modes.