@ pumeco:

Talking of snow, I guess the shader you have seen was Snarlygribbly's Snow Machine. I have it for long time already, and in fact it inspired to look deeper into what we can do with the P-Node, and also the N-Node. Snarly's snow machine gives you the choice of increasing or decreasing the displacement offset, in order to have a thick or a thin snow layer on the basic material, just like I have done with my foam shader. The snow machine also evaluates the slope of the underlying object to determine whether snow can lie on it (more horizontal) or cannot lie on it (more vertical slope), this is done by evaluating the y-component of the N-Node.

Second inspiration were very many posts of Bagginsbill, who has so often suggested the use of 2 or more material layers which can be blended (or masked) into each other by various elaborated control node combinations. So there is nothing really new in my shader, maybe apart from the way I tried to create the foam surface detail. When I found it came closer to the 'bubbly' sort of foam, I became more courageous with the displacement and found it can work out a little more 'fluffy' than just the flat soapy foam.

Another occasion where I used a cascade of 3 material layers was to cut Victoria4 open on a morgue table... I created a black/white mask image of a cut along her body, blending in the muscle texture map. Then another (slightly smaller) black/white mask image, which blended in transparency to her skin in this area, exposing the underlying organs and skeleton. So from outside to inside blending her skin from normal (however bloody ;-)) skin to muscle map skin then to transparency. Creating the same two black/white mask images with additional blurred contours could be used as displacement maps, thus bending the skin a little bit outside at the rims of the hole, like in reality. I never posted something with it though, it became far too realistic and disturbing, when I came close to reality, smile...

Thanks so much for appreciation, I hope I can return something back to the community where me myself have so often benefitted from the knowledge shared by others :-)

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Don't render faster than your artistic guardian angel can fly...