Hi all!
I am soooo desperate I’ve been trying to make those materials for 2 months but with no acceptable results.
Let me explain what I’m struggling to do.
I want to make ice columns like in the movie: I tried with glass, mixing with glossy, adding bump maps of ice, cracked ice etc., emission and so on, but it also glows inside… Adding volume emission… I get strange shaped light bulb instead of icy columns. So I tried to use volume scattering with putting lamps inside object, but it looked like white-muddy water in bumped tank.
Next thing are those frames that glows purple on the columns and I guess that those “doors” are the same material or pretty similar. I was doing pretty much as much as my experience with blender let me to do, but again with no acceptable results.
I have some textures, some of them I made myself in photoshop and I think they are good enough.
I belive that making those materials is possible in cycles, because I’ve seen more stunning materials made with it and I hope it’s just my poor (just over a year) experience.
If you need I can share textures I’m working with
Here’s a reference and I beg you for some help (node setups )
First: which render engine are you working with?
With BI, it can be made with very different settings. With Cycles (or any pbr engine) you must also play with the lights to get this result. (Volume scatter would be the ideal, but not the only solution)
I want it do be done in cycles. I’m ready for any way (lights, modeling… whatever) to get closest possible results. Have anybody got some ideas for node setup?
Might help. Also you can is_camera etc to separate light from materiel. This might help as you might need to blow the emitter way up but you don’t want to overload the visual of the ice.
As I said before I tried almost everything I could. I used lamps, roughness with image texture etc. but without results as on reference. Volume scattering doesn’t help much because it makes material too rough inside. It should be glossy like real ice is, but also it has to scatter light, but not like only volume scatter node, it has to be something different. About frames of columns I have no idea. I tried a lot but nothing helped, because as you can see it glows blue and purple in different places and mostly on the bottom (same with these “doors”). I need someone with much bigger experience who can get result as on the reference image.
You can see here that colums should be very glossy but somehow without reflecting the environment. How to do this (I tried mixing 50/50 glossy and material that I had, but it’s not it)?
I tried with speculatity map and it doesn’t work to give me expected results. When you look down from above ice looks like mirror, and if you look at it “normaly” it’s transparet; I mean it’s normal behaviour of refractive stuff like water, ice etc, and it doesn’t need any specularity maps. I tried emission but it makes ice too rough, that light has to come from inside of model, not from the surface…
So I need something different. Maybe you have idea about frames/doors (because it’s totally different kind of material)?
problem is that if you make wall glossy it will also reflect the inside objects!
another way would be to composite it
put you wall son another layer with a big HDRI map
render it as a pass
and render the inside on ano0ther layer
composite it
Frames-these vertical things that are sticked to columns and glows purple and blue. Do you have any idea (node setup welcomed) for material for them
Compositing could be hudge problem because scene is very complex: I had one storey below, chandelier, staircases, that giant snowflake and much more and I separated it to multilple layers to have more control on render times. I’m also going to recreate entire palace with it’s environment, so I want to avoid playing with multiple render layers.
You might be able to do something like I’ve used on my sunset egg hereI posted the other day in the procedural Easter egg painting comp :), I’ve added the blend file so you can see the setup (apologies for the noodle soup I was just playing around wasn’t intended for general consumption essentially just mix an emission and volume absorption with a slightly funky glass setup with reflections and control of the shadows that I based on the chocofur tutorial), not saying it’s the best way to do it but I think it could work. I also use the z value from the object to create a vertical colour ramp, all feels useful for what you are trying to do
just delete the other eggs and try rendering just that one, the dragon egg has SSS on it so the file is set up for experimental GPU try flipping it to normal instead of experimental and see if that works there shouldn’t be anything to funky in that one.
I did this before, but it still crashes. Anyways: here’s my blend and some textures feel free to experiment with them, but don’t forget to share results
In next post I’ll give more textures, that could be useful Columns to share.blend (669 KB)
I used procedural noise, but I just prefer using images that I edited
PS. I think that problem is also about that when we have “deep” displacement map blender makes some parts of gloss or glass surface black. In my opinion these parts should be white, because this is the way real life materials acts…
I’d say in the style of frozen not a copy but perhaps this could get you going, it’s just one material, all procedural you can tweak the various ramps for colour, bump etc. / swap out different textures etc if you like until it look like you want.
I think you may have been having issues because you did all the edges with edge split, not sure how cycles handles that with transmission as you are making the mesh non manifold I took it off and put some edge loops and sub suf on instead then you also get nice highlights on the edges and can use the new pointyness node in 2.74. (I didn’t pay much attention putting the edge loops they need doing properly if you are going to do that I just chucked some one.
Umii, you made very good and very close to the original volumetric lighting and nice reflections (but IMO procedural textures aren’t the best way to make this material). Eppo, you made great material that really nice diffuse light from lamp inside mesh.
I think your materials should be combined together
Anyways, I have to share what I figured out:
I found out, that this material should reflect and intensify white light and very close to white colours, making them almost white to make reflected object shape almost indistinguishable. That material shoud also let light from inside go outside. One quesstion: HOW? (I like nodes because they gives infinite possibilities, but I also hate them because they are sooo complicated).
I’ve been trying to make those materials for 2 months but with no acceptable results.
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