has any of the vray material experts tried to make a good looking material for sugar?
i tried it with translucent but my results are crap, to be honest. 
Some refraction and fog should do it
What exactly does sugar look like? I’m looking at what I’m about to eat, and it looks just like salt.
Here’s some IOR’s:
Sodium Chloride (Salt) 1 … 1.544
Sodium Chloride (Salt) 2 … 1.644
Sugar Solution (30%) … 1.38
Sugar Solution (80%) … 1.49
Solution is liqud form, but salt is basically like sugar I think.
sorry, i forget to mention that it is for a close up of a sugar cube.
refraction + fog just don´t do it for me. 
Add a particle system emitting from a cube to that equation and you should start getting some results.
egz’s right. Don’t forget that sugar has a cubic crystalline structure which is more or less randomly fused together (I’m not a chemist, so no knocks on my description). The crystals themselves are cubes which have refractive qualities.
if you want to render this particle system with refractive material and fog how long will it take?
i don´t know how to do it but is there no easyer way to do it with displacement?
How about something like this using SSS and a noise displacement map?
looks great!
i would like that material can you make it downloadable??
Good job PixelJockey 
Looks great!
--Jon
No problem… Here you go. Actually it’s just a modified scene created by Vlado to demonstrate SSS. I just made the box a chamfered box, fiddled with the material and added the displacement map.
sugar.zip - it’s a Max 4.26 model.
thanks!
thanks from me too!!
nice work PixelJockey I’m wordering if the shadows are too dark. I’m guessing that the light gets really scattered through the cubes & so the shadows are softer.
i don´ t think so.
i look on a real one right now and it looks the same.
now he will be pushed into my coffee.
i tried your scene PixelJockey without any changes (exept the maps that are not inluded) and im still waiting that a 64x64 bucket of a 1024x786 image is finished on a P4 2.4 GHz after 9 minutes.
is it that slow?
Yes it is that slow…
Change the color treshold in the refract interpolation to 0.8 and it will be lot faster (but less quality of course). Also set GI min max settings to something very low.
It’s a fine displacement mapped cube, with glossy refraction, translucency and GI on it… It just cannot be fast!
i have already set irradiance map to LOW and played with the interpolation settings but it´s still very! slow.
a 64x64 bucket on my 2.4 GHz P4 took 30 minutes to render with the irradiance map LOW-preset. :roll:
edit: ok, when i set the color thres. to 0.8 then i need 6 minutes for a 64x64 bucket (1024x786 resolution).
i don´ t think so.
i look on a real one right now and it looks the same.
Well, if it looks correct then great. 8)