Any ideas how to achieve this with Vray? Or By geometry (more likely)

[simmsimaging]

Still and vid both look good - but the refractive glossiness (cheated or otherwise) will make it sing If you are concerned about render times you might try refractive glossy interpolation. It's kinda crap for detail, but you don't really need much detail inside there depending on how glossy you go. Might be worth a shot anyway.

Great reference site too - thanks for the link.
b

[mkhachfe]

Still and vid both look good - but the refractive glossiness (cheated or otherwise) will make it sing If you are concerned about render times you might try refractive glossy interpolation. It's kinda crap for detail, but you don't really need much detail inside there depending on how glossy you go. Might be worth a shot anyway.

Great reference site too - thanks for the link.
b

I agree. I did actually add it with a cheat. I rendered a seperate SSS (fast) pass and used compund blur in After Effects. here is a still. It is on the vid, but very low setting. I think the blur needs a bit more work though...

[simmsimaging]

Nice, but still looks sharper (internally) than your reference. It's cool - just different.

/b

[mkhachfe]

Nice, but still looks sharper (internally) than your reference. It's cool - just different.

/b

Alright alright! I get it! Ill work on it some more!


Just kidding, i really appreciate the critique mate. In fact, im trying to get the big brown blurry shape in the bottom right of the ref image i showed. I love that. But its bloody hard.

[simmsimaging]

I'm not trying to bust your balls - it's just the kind of thing I love to work on and I could tell by your images that your standard is high.

I had a thought about a way to do your blurry shape: VrayEnvironmentFog. Put an amorphous shape inside your stone and make it a fog gizmo. Playing around with it I think it could work great - might have to do a test image of my own with this method at some point. Anyway - here's what I came up with as rough tests. It will work IMO, but not sure if the render times will be workable for you if refraction glossiness was already an issue...





/b

[mkhachfe]

Hey, that first image looks very nice. Exactly what im after..gonna work on that tonight. Thanks for the tips....

[super gnu]

great idea with the env. fog. you could also simply confine it to the interior of your grain geometry, then use complex procedurals to control the density etc..

[super gnu]

i was intrigued by this so i gave it a go

using the env. fog confined to the inside of the crystal geometry, with a tweaked cellular map controlling the density and a noise map varying the colour. the tests dont really include any other fancy effects (bit of bump mapping, no sss / glossy refraction/translucency) , and the geometry is a bit rough, but it definitely shows potential. with more in depth procedural work, and possibly adding geometry to guide it more as brett suggested, you could do some really complex internal structures. combined with the stuff you already have, you could get something quite convincing i recon.

images show the env. fog alone, and rendered inside a crystal.

[simmsimaging]

That has some legs for sure! Excellent idea with the 3D procedurals - totally forgot you could do that. I'll definitely have to give this a go myself when I free up some time to test.