-
Displacement and General Texturing of Dense Glass
UPDATED 10/22 5:09
I’m try to improve my texturing skills, and wanted to replicate this look:
This is what I have so far:
I’m getting closer, as I figured out the Vertex Map issue (thanks to GreyscaleGorilla), but I’m still not getting the density I want, especially on the top right edge of the front prism.
Obviously not even close.I have color, transparency, and reflection on one material and only displacement on another. The displacement texture is restricted with a polygon selection tag and mixed with the first texture.
1. I think they’ve used a Vertex Map to have the displacement smoothly fade off on the edges, but I can’t figure out how to restrict the displacement using a vertex map.
2. I love how the reference material is transparent but still looks dense. Is this done through SSS? Or can it be achieved using only transparency? I haven’t wrapped my head around how transparency and SSS interact. Additionally, it seems like the displacement in the reference is creating shadows on itself, which makes the furrows very prominent. However, I can’t seem to get any self shadowing without lowering the transparency.
Any suggestions or links to tutorials would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-
6 Replies
-
it looks like your refraction might be set to 1 (since the dark rock behind is not distorted much (if at all). Something else to help solidity is make sure your Absorption Color and the Absorption distance are set to values that are right for your object but the refraction value is huge – there is a set of example refraction values in the help in Material Properties/Material Editor:Transparency
-
The transparency does currently use absorption distance, but the main transparency color is white.
One of the things that bugs me is the edges of my prism are very transparent. Could that be because of the main transparency color? I can’t figure out how they got the next hard edges in the reference.
Regarding the index of refraction, I tried that at first, but from looking at my reference image, it seems like the refraction is set to 1. I say this because there is a rock that penetrates the prism at the bottom left corner.
I tried to outline below so you can compare it to the original reference.
Am I just imagining it? Or is the index of refraction actually 1 in the reference?
-
The index of refraction can’t be 1 if you want it to look like right. It should be around 1.5 for glass.
-
In case anyone was having the same problem, I realized I forgot the fresnel on the transparency channel!
-
Better, but it still doesn’t look right without refraction.
-
Yea, I set the index of refraction to 1.7 (most gems are 1.7) and used a normal direction shader and backlight shader to make the gem look more solid. it was too purely and evenly transparent before.
But now I’m noticing hard lines along the edges of the shape, even though the displacement should smooth it out. The sub-poly displacement is working, but the polygons are also popping out in a recognizable way. Could this be because I triangulated mesh after I had set the vertex map? No new vertices were created, but maybe making new edges messes it up?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up