Crystal material WIP

Hi anyone, i’m working on a crystal material that i’m going to use in another project… to me it looks quite good now, i’m posting it here to get different opinions, and suggestions for further improvement…

the crystal model here is nothing special, hopefully i’ll make a better one for the final project, now i’m only interested in the material, which is 100% procedural and has no textures…


and here are two earlier images, with quite ugly crystal shapes :-)… but they’re fine just for testing the material



the same post is on artstation too
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gdxlQ

final note, i’m using Lukas Stockner’s denoising build, i find it faster and it handles noise and caustics quite well…

thank you all for any feedback, and have a great weekend!

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The top one looks real enough to fool me, I was a jewelry and metalsmith major for 2 years. the two lower ones might pass for rock candy, the inclusions look like bubbles.Also the geometry is unnatural in the lower two for any mineral I know of with the exception of Apache tears (a better type of obsidian) which are smokey. The middle right in the middle picture is starting to resemble moldavite or watermelon tourmaline but the geometry and graininess needs to be addressed.

The top one looks really photorealistic to me, great job.

thanks springwater, for the two lower ones i didn’t really put any effort into the models (as we can all see :slight_smile: ), i just wanted some basic shapes to test the material… which makes little sense as the shape is very important too…

in the first picture i completely forgot the particles… do you think i should keep (and improve) the bubbles or just remove them? i think i made them too regular and too big to look realistic…


thanks Domenico, much appreciated!


Domenico ho provato ad aprire il link artstation che hai sulla firma ma mi manda sempre sulla pagina behance, mi sa che il link è saltato…

Any chance that you share the node setup :)?

Ya the bubbles were too big and regular I think, raw minerals sometimes have clefts and channels and growths and sometimes other minerals are growing on them as well as you may know. Some of the inclusions will be of a host rock type such as Rhyolite.

absolutely, that was the idea from the very beginning, once it’s done i’ll share both the file and a video of the making…

btw i see you are using gumroad, is it free? would you recommend it?

perfect, thank you… i’ll change the particles and see if i can find a way to make the channels inside, then i think i can call it done… the cluster in the first picture was made using particles, so there will always be random inclusions inside, this time blender is taking care of things without even knowing :-)…

Nice, i am looking forward to your progress.

btw i see you are using gumroad, is it free? would you recommend it?

Yeah I would totally recommend Gumroad, it’s free to sign-up and sell stuff, but they do take a small portion off of sales/donations. I think it’s a great platform either way.

Glad to have you onboard :slight_smile:

Thanks, i’ll try it very soon

And i have an update, new model from scratch and some variations in the material… plus the particles are now smaller (maybe even too much) and irregular, not like bubbles any longer… overall i think the surface imperfections are better in this version… i think the first one looked more shiny and eye-catching, this one is different, looks denser as if less light is passing through…

EDIT: i think it’s just because i used a darker orange for this one, tomorrow i’ll give it another render…


it was just the color, but i also changed a few other things (more particles, the shape of the pointy ends)… i think it looks better now, but still not as good as the first one…


ooooook i fixed a few things in the material (mainly the roughness that was too high), and slightly changed the particles inside the crystal, now it looks way better… i think it’s very close to done, but all suggestions are very welcome, as usual!

EDIT: funny, preview looks the same as the one in the last post :-)… but zooming on the image will show the differences on the surface


looks like melting :eyebrowlift: crystallized are flat-solid surfaces, that’s the whole thing about it

i wonder why so many doesn’t at least look at references

you are absolutely right, in my last one the spikes (if that’s what they are called) are rough and crystals are never like that, thanks for the critic!!!

about references, actually i have a few crystals here on my desk right now and some of them are rough, similar to this one

but that’s true only for the small ones, not clusters… as you said the spikes are always flat on the sides, thanks again for pointing that out!

hi anyone, after some time a little update:


i polished the first crystal i made, added small particles inside, re rendered it with the denoise feature (from buildbot) and uploaded that file on gumroad (for free) to begin with

in the future i hope i’ll be able to fix the other version and model a few more variations, to make some kind of crystal mini pack, which will be free too…

but for now, if you want to test the model i would really appreciate the feedback, mostly to find out flaws or mistakes…

thank you all for being part of this, and have a great weekend!!!