Amber

[kaffee.sturm]

Hi everyone.
How would you create amber with vray 1.50.SP4 ?
I can use vraymtl with fog or fastsss(2) but i dont know what is the right decision.
I created a sphere with FFD-modifier and i use a vray-light.

[simmsimaging]

I might try SSS2 but I do find it hard to setup intuitively. VraMTl has the advantage of being simpler, and also visible to RT if you use that - which is hugely helpful for complex materials.

[kaffee.sturm]

Thank you. I can use RT so i will try vraymtl first.

[kaffee.sturm]

Hi again,

in the attachment you can see some amber. The last one is my actual status.
I used Vraymtl with a noise-map in the refractionslot and fog colour.
Do you have an idea how i can create air-bubbles and this stringily stuff inside of amber?
What can i do better?
The colour is nearby ok. It`s like in pictures 2 and 4.

[rmejia]

Don't know if any of these are good, but it could be a start:
http://www.vray-materials.de/all_mat...&Submit=Search

[simmsimaging]

Looking good so far.

For the air bubbles I would actually make some bubbles with a particle system/scatter setup. That works best IMO.

For the striations: some appear to be roughly cut surfaces, some are interior artifacts. The former you can do with sculpting or roughness maps for refract/reflect glossiness. The latter are harder - personally I would try and hit it in Photoshop. Sorry I don't have anything better to offer.

b

[simmsimaging]

Just had a thought, but haven't had time to experiment to see if it would work - it's a way of doing cracked glass that might work for the interior striations:

Try a plane intersecting the amber object (just to see if it would work, it doesn't matter about the size much).

Give it the same amber material, but change the IOR. Map the opacity with a scratch map of white on black. Should render as just a series of fine lines. Now displace that with the same map and you should end up with a series of amber ridges. If they are inside the main amber and have a different IOR it might give you the right look. If so then it's just a matter of creating the right patterns.



b

[kaffee.sturm]

Thank you simmsimaging!

I added air-bubbles i have created by spheres and gave them the same amber-material but negative IOR. It looks really nice but i will post my result tomorrow.
Your idea with the planes i will test later but i guess it should work.

[simmsimaging]

Happy to help. I was pretty curious about the striation thing so ran a test myself. This may be one of the brighter ideas I've had in a while

See attached.

It's very rough still, but I think it likely that it could work well. Simple plane with a similar sort of amber coloured material as the noise sphere. I used a <1 IOR for that, and >1 IOR for the sphere.

The plane does not use fog though, I used a smoke map in the Refract colour instead (don't really need the fog depth thing, and you can't map that for variety of colour).

Then just a VrayDisplacement modifier set to use the water level function to clip out the majority of the plane.

With the right colours, map for the patterns, and a bit of finessing I think this will work great. The other thought I had was renderable splines, but no time to try it right now.

Anyway, hope it helps, and looking forward to seeing your results.

b

[simmsimaging]

Another quick test. This one is with some ribbons of poly's drawn through the shape. They are shelled to have a bit of thickness and a bit of fog value. Also workable, although you have to sculpt the shapes a bit more to get a nice result. In any case, you can create some interesting stuff this way, although it may still be hard to hit your exact reference.

If you are doing stills I'd still think doing some of it in Photoshop would be the way to go.

b

[peterguthrie]

mmmm marmalade!

[kaffee.sturm]

Thank you again simmsimaging!!
This looks really nice. By now i do not have time to test that, but i will post my results as soon as posible.

I was pretty curious about the striation thing so ran a test myself. This may be one of the brighter ideas I've had in a while

[kaffee.sturm]

hi again.

@simmsimaging: this is my final result. maybe i`ll try to create some caustics later. i used planes and branches for for the interior striations with an own amber material. for the air-bubbles i used spheres with a minimal change to the amber material. also i added a little displacement and bump.
i think you can find any attributes of many amberstone you look at.
greets

[simmsimaging]

Looks pretty cool! Maybe just a bit over-saturated in the highlight yellows?

[kaffee.sturm]

Thank you.
There were one light with a very high multiplier. But it is a logo so i will see which one fits better. It don`t has to be 100% realistic.