So I made this Ring using Blender, Affinity Designer, and Quixel Mixer.
My goal was to try and figure out a way to do displacements when it comes
to ornaments and stuff without any high-priced tools.
I basically baked a texture with illuminating materials and went to work on it in Affinity Designer.
Then using my very rough displacement map I used Quixel Mixer to get some more nice materials and also to export some normal maps.
The stones I have made using faceting diagrams from us https://usfacetersguild.org/
One designed by Arya Akhavan and a Model of a Mini Cushion Barion Square, a Faceting diagram designed by Alexandre Wolkonsky.
I worked with this using both Blender 2.83 and 2.91.
It is rendered in cycles.
Your ruby material looks off because the surface reflections are red in addition to the internal reflections. This isn’t how real rubies react to light. The surface reflections should be the same colour as the environment. I suspect you have just used a coloured glass shader.
A better approach would be to use a setup like this. The one on the left is a straight coloured glass shader as a comparison, the one on the right has the nodes displayed. The reflections look much more natural using a mix of glossy and refraction rather than a glass shader.
So I used the material you proposed @moony nd also added some slight fingerprints (can’t really see that, but it makes it look less “too clean”. thoughts?
Definitely looks better. Your environment lighting looks a bit muted though, especially on the front face of the ruby - what are your clamp settings set to in the render panel?
I tend to find setting direct light to 0 (i.e. unclamped) and indirect to 10 usually gives a good results whilst supressing fireflies. If you are using a HDRI, also make sure you have multiple importance sampling active.
So I have those settings you talked about already.
But I have both set up key-light and fill-light in the scene and the HDRI had at a low intensity.
Let’s play a bit with those settings and see what it looks like.
So it seems cranking up makes it look better but then the background looks off.
So I rendered it out with a transparent background and added a darker version in post.
If you want to do more work with gemstones, I created a shader a while back that adds dispersion using a neat trick with the white noise node (rather than the usual method of adding three glass shaders).
Rubies also tend to scatter light inside. You might consider adding Volume Scatter to get a nice pink/red result. Sorry for the bad quality; I just rendered quickly and the denoiser blurred it weirdly:
Funny you mention that, because Sapphire and Ruby actually are the same gem, corundum. Emeralds are different, so I’m not sure if it’d look correct with the same scattering.
So I tried your material @moony , looks good as a diamond. But I think I need to do something along the lines of @sizzler for the Sapphire look. Maybe a combination.
One thought is that the density is based on the scale. I think my gem scale was around 1cm in that render. If your gems are different you’d probably have to adjust the density. I try to model everything at world scale (or close) whenever I do anything with materials.
I don’t really have any links - I looked up the IOR and then looked at pictures and did some web searches. There’s probably a lot more you could do to make it more realistic.
I’ve attached my blend file so hopefully that can help you to get the same look:
Hi @sizzler
So I used your material and made some changes to color and density due to the difference in scale and the look that I am after. I think its looks OK. A bit on the pink side.
