This is a wip. The crystals are supposed to be quartz rising from a crudely carved stone. There will be some more texture work to the stone base, of course. I have a scene in mind for these. Thanks for looking.
Looks good, I’ve always had a hard time with crystals. Should turn out pretty nice.
Thanks. I can give you the material settings, if you like. Or I could just upload the .blend and you can look for yourself. I played around with the sliders for a bit, but I like the final result.
uhhhh, that quite reminds me of Command and Conquer or StarCraft. Both superb games 
What color will you use? Blue (StarCraft), or Green (C&C) or another?? 
I’ve played starcraft before, but I don’t remember seeing crystals there that looked like these. The idea didn’t come from a game, my partner has all these quartz crystals lying around, I used one of the clearest ones for a reference.
hehe, ok. Well, on videos of starcraft you can see similar ones, but it is
more similar to the C&C-Crystals. But hey If you are pointing to reality,
I am Looking forward for more!! But I would like to see a picture of your
reference
Ok, there is one of some crystals that I have on hand. I wanted the ones I modeled to be clear tho. And then there is a lighting experiment on the crystals. I like the red glow. Will have to experiment with different color combos until I like one. The image could be used as a desktop I suppose.
Attachments
I like the red… Have you tried light blue - like in StarCraft?
Give it some post-pro glow using either a glarnode or a simple blurnode.
Try render in Indigo, the reselt will be better.
Well thanks for the suggestions. I was trying to make it glow using the emit slider. I’ll play around with it a bit and post some different colors soon.
Emit doesn’t produce a glow in the Internal Renderer. You could also try a node material where you mix in halos to get a glow.
Yeah, that’s a little beyond my scope at this time. But I’ll keep pressing buttons and moving sliders, maybe one day I’ll get them right.
Here is a fairly easy way to do it. At least I hope it is easy :).
Add a new renderlayer and put just your crystal on it. Leave the original renderlayer with the crystal and the rock as it is. Detauils can be found here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Render_Layers
Then go to the node editor and press the little face icon (this is compositing nodes the other is material nodes) Details can be read here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Node_Composition
Now add an input node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Input) and choose the renderlayer with your crystal on it add another input node and choose the renderlayer with your rock and crystal on it.
Now add a blur node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Filters#Blur_Node) and connect the image output of just the crystal to the blur node image input and blur it by some value (10 -20 px should be enough for x and y).
Now add a mix node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Color#Mix_Node) and connect the blur node image output with the uppper image input of the mix node and add your complete crystal (the other input node) to the lower image input of the mix node. Now set the mix mode to screen. To see the result add a Viewer Node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Output#Viewer) and connect the output of the mix node to the input of the viewer node. To see the result either press the backdrop button in the compositing window or open an image/editor window and select viewer as the display option and you will see the result of the viewer in the Image/Editor window.
When you are happy with what you see connect the output of the mix node with the composite node (if you don’t have one allready add one from the output menue http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Output#Composite). Now all you need to do is activate do composite in the render panel and press render and you should have a glow.
To enhance the glow you can add a RGB Color Curve node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Color#RGB_Curves_Node) before the blur node and tweak the curve to enhance and change the color of the glow. Or you can try to add a bright/contrast node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Color#Bright.2FContrast) and/or a gamma-node ( http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Nodes_Color#Gamma) to your blur.
Play a little a round it isn’t really that hard and it is lot’s of fun. And if you have any questions feel free to ask. If you want to you could also post your blend and I will provide you a basic setup from which you can start.
pretty cool, can wait till you post this blurred and in blue ;)!
Are you sure? According to THIS part of the blender manual emit is an essential part of producing ‘radiating’ light.
Now lets be clear, in order for the DESIRED effect to be achieved, there are plenty of other settings that need to be adjusted. After all, a glow stick wouldn’t look half as good if the light didn’t go past the plastic shell onto your hand/face/wall/whatever. But in blender emit most definitely produces radiating light which is a very big part of what makes things “glow”.
A couple of comments about the quartz itself. If you’re looking to reproduce a naturally-grown quartz crystal, include some internal fracturing, cloudiness and other imperfections. Completely pure natural quartz (base to tip) is pretty rare and in a cluster such as this perhaps only one part of a large crystal would be completely free of flaws. Also, add a “crust” of smaller crystal growth at the base of the large cluster. Large crystals never grow in complete isolation and such crusts are very commonly seen.
Haha, he says,
And then he proceeds to talk in Klingon! Man, that sounds like I really want to know what you’re talking about. It’s like the instructions on how to get an FTL drive up and running.
Yes my statement wasn’t entirly true. I forgot to mention that a true glow requires radiosity to be activated for BI. I can not confirm the radiating light without radiosity. My test with BI show clearly that there is no radiating light without activating radiosity. You have to fake the radiating light with strategic placed lights.
Oh and rendertime will sky rocket once you activate radiosity. While the postpro way is fast in terms of rendering time.
It is not Klingon, it’s Vulcan What’s an FTL drive?
I almost thought that it isn’t as easy as it sounded when I wrote it 
but the wiki manual links I posted should get you started and running. That is also the reason I suggested posting a blend to provide a base setup making it easier to see what I mean. Maybe if I find the time tonight I will comeup with a base setup explaining it and post that.