realistic crystls - need imput - Simply Maya User Community

# 1 26-08-2006 , 06:36 AM

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Join Date: Jan 2005

Location: vienna

Posts: 1,095

realistic crystls - need imput

hi everyone. I´m testing materials for creating realistic Crystals now for quite some time. renderer = mentalRay. shaders tested - DGS, diElectric and l_glass. l_glass is the only shader which fakes dispersion, so this is my shader of choice. in addition I applied a glare shader to my renderCam to push the specular highlights.

there are some other criterias but the shader which I am not so experienced in. this is lightning and the usage of background material. I did some tutorials about studio lightning and using DGS material for backdrop and reflector material. but after all it has no other effect than a simple lambert mat. also the lightning stuff. I ended with 13 spotlights in my scene to have a homogenious enlighted crystal. but is 13 lights not way to much? there must be a method for using less than 10 or even 5 lights...?

spotlights have no decay/area enabled, also it isn´t rendered with GI/Caustics nor FG cause that didn´t give much improvement but increased rendertime a lot.

if anybody has any comments how to improve the renders, please do so!

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# 2 27-08-2006 , 04:02 PM

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Join Date: May 2005

Location: Manchester Uk

Posts: 6,300

Hey man, glad you posted what you got.

They look really cool, have you thought of pushing any of hte material attributes above the 1 value to see if theres any effects on it?

I kind of cheated on my diamonds though by adding a HDR to give some colour bleed onto the surfaces so they wernt pure refractions

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# 3 27-08-2006 , 11:18 PM

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Join Date: Jan 2005

Location: vienna

Posts: 1,095

yes I raised the specular color from l_glas shader to 1.5 but therefore decreased the decay from 80 to 15. at first I tried too using hdri. but the shader with alone spotlights creates enough color to leave out additional reflection supporters.

I´ll do some testing now and show how different settings affect the final image. what I can already say is that pushing the specular value above 1 is tricky cause 1.5 is even more than enough. it blows polys which are facing towards the camera. I guess a range of +-0.1 is proper.

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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realistic crystls - need imput

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