Hello guys, I am trying to create liquid that has glitter but not exactly glitter within the water. Something reminiscent of a magical potion. If you’ve ever seen pearlescent paint mixing, its something along those lines but more water-like and translucent.
I have tried my hand at this and achieved somewhat success, but it is not what I am aiming for.
First of all, it does not look like water, probably because of the glass shader, besides that the glitter-like texture is not translucent. Also, the glitter does not look like its part of the volume, it only looks like its on the outside. If anyone here has any suggestions on how to make it look better, maybe even overhaul the entire thing, I’d be grateful.
Yeah, I have used something like that a few times…I made sure to set the Planes to transparent so that the " Black Spots" don’t appear as noticeably, as setting your Lights to no shadow messes with the overall effect.
This type of effect is very difficult to achieve in Cycles (currently). The effect relies on millions of microscopic, anisotropic glossy particles which align to the direction of fluid flow when the liquid is stirred.
Cycles doesn’t handle sub pixel glossy/glints very well, so even if you simulated this using a particle system, the effect wouldn’t be very good.
Using a volumetric shader isn’t really possible either, since at the moment, Cycles volume shaders only handle scattering and absorption, not reflection.
It’s possible you may be able to get some sort of effect using volumetric anisotropy (see screenshot). This will affect the way the volumetric scattering effect works when light hits it (negative values act like a retroreflector, sending light back to the source).
