I am looking for a solution to generate geometry for foam bubbles to render images like the ones in the attachment.
Rendering closeup water without bubbles always looks CG 
If I use instanced spheres they dont reflect/refract as needed because of the intersecting walls.
I wonder if you guys can give us a new type of meshing or modify one of the existing algorithms to create flattened shared walls between the intersecting sphere blobs and of course these blobs have to inherit the scale of the particles.
I found this free software that creates pretty decent topology for intersecting spheres:
math.cmu.edu/~fho/jenn/
could you generate the spheres, run a PRT volume on that to get a shell surface, and then remesh that with frost?
not really sure it would give the same effect⌠just kinda shooting in the dark.
That kind of an effect is on my âcool-things-todo-listâ for a long time now and I cant find the time to start working on it. I think the best approach will be a thinking particles setup. The setup will need to generate bubbles and place them together using a random pivot distance from each other. Theyâd also need to be killed randomly and sucked in at the free space the killed bubble left. The intersecting areas will be a challenge too.
If you need it for a still frame then it can be easily faked with booleans. 
If you need just a pile of soap bubbles without any real behavior you could fake it with sprites. Say you have a bunch of particles, you can mesh a portion of it with frost and for the rest use sprites. Some sprites can be a full bubble and make some others that are already intersected.
Challenge accepted! (scurries offâŚ)
Not sure if this physically accurate, but if you made a mask so that for each voxel that is splatted by one sphere you mark as âUnion of Spheresâ and for every voxel that is splatted by more than one sphere you change to âVoronoiâ and then unioned the levelsets together and added a slight blur you would get something nice (I think).
Just tried running an edge detect filter on the signed distance voxels made by particles where the radii approach zero. Assuming you have uniformly sized particles, this works well. It highlights the âvalleysâ between the particles. Not sure if this can be easily expanded to non-uniform particle radii.
I would love to have this as well - it was on my test list for Frost if I had time on the demo 
Iâll be very interested in how this one develops!
b
Thank you guys
I am working on this idea for couple years now. I need a plugin solution not a hack method (blur and glow ). Generating the particles for it is not a problem at all (RF, TP, PFlow, etc.). Meshing the particles is a problem. The mathematics is not that difficult but yes, we need some kind of Boolean meshing algorithm that can be exported in to a mesh sequence.
Hopefully that will be possible with Frost soon too.
Thx
Attila
Well thereâs a plugin for maya called stretchMesh that can make such deformations.
youtube.com/watch?v=C_C_69pkqoY - See at 2:50
Tho they show one ball deforming each other, but Iâm pretty sure you can make them deform each other.
You could make all the big bubbles with it and cover the rest with particles of small bubbles.
Itâs not deformation thatâs the problem. Thereâs no way to mesh it currently. Even if you made each bubble a softbody with volume preservation, rendering it would be problematic.
Yes softbodies might work too but will need to be tweaked carefully. Anyhow, whether how to mesh it all really depends on how the general effect moves and supposed to be animated. Atka007 has put snapshots of 3 different types of foamy soap bubbles so I guess we all see a different approach to a different look. If itâs only big bubbles sucked together I donât see why it needs to meshed at all. Once the geometry behaves correctly you just need the shading work to look right and render.
Guys, please stop talking about cheats, I went over all the cheats already the last couple years. I am not a junior and I am not looking for tutorials. This is me : hyperorganic.com
I need a response from a developer , perhaps Paul or Mr Bobo with an answer if this could be integrated in the near future.
I want to make kick ass shots with foam and bubbles , because small scale water does not hold up as realistic mesh with our current mesh techniques in 30% of the situations. I see Frost as the best next gen mesh solution, thats why I am asking to integrate this in the code.
Thanks for your attention.
Attila
Interesting research examples:
users.aber.ac.uk/sxc/foam.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_bubble (Merging section)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Karlh ⌠plement%29 (Bubble Physics section)
Thank you for this links!
This is on our wish list, but unfortunately I donât think weâll be able to add it in the near future.
kinda a cocky answer, I donât think people realized you were looking for a 100% real effect and were just trying to help out and brainstorm.
in my head â an animation doesnât have to be 100% physically accurate, it just needs to convey the idea. As one of my college
professors best said once oh so long ago. âSometimes you have to lie to tell the truthâ parthenon is an easy example.
my unwanted 2 cents.