Was playing with some ocean foam taking some ideas from Hannes's work.
Gotta say, using intersection and such I'm not able to really translate over my foam shapes I originally made. Least, it doesn't look exact.
Yes, it's quite tricky. For testing purposes, you can apply a simple dark blue shader to your surface and add a white surface layer upon that. Enable shaders in the 3D preview, and then play with the intersect underlying values. So you can see in the preview immediately, what these values do. I have to say, that I don't really understand, how this works, but trial and error gives you (hopefully) the desired effect eventually.
I don't know the dimensions of your plane, so I don't know, if it helps to use my settings for the white foam (see image below). My plane had a length and width of 150 units.
Thanks for the input. I have a solid surface in there to toggle for speed. And yeah intersect underlying is interesting. Not sure what's happening. Just when I thought I understand a setting I have to wildly change it out of that understanding to fine tune the area lol
Scale is 25m now I believe. Originally was at 10 meters. Trying to work at scale.
I apparently never attached new images. Here is the optimized setup. Few different ways using breakup or masking and one using masking on the wake colour accents.
I'm unsure where the fine dots come from. They don't exist in the seafoam colours. I'm guessing the intersect underlying fuzzy zone, or the water displacement.
Good development!
Perhaps next year I will look about sea water too... But I am still far more user than developer ;)