Breaking waves modeling tests

Creating breaking waves is a difficult topic in computer generated images. They have a very detailed geometry influenced by the environment in a complicated way and their light interaction is quite difficult to simulate as well. Here are some tests i did recently.

The water is an isosurface object in all versions using a fairly complicated (and slow) function. To speed up the render i refrained from using scattering media for the foam, therefore it looks fairly dark and unrealistic when viewed directly against the light.

The sky is created with LightSys, the clouds with MakeCloud.