I have been working on making a good pylon material for a Starcraft 2 render I am working on, and I wanted to know if you all like it before I put it into the real scene. For those of you who do not know, the pylon from Starcraft is an energy crystal that powers warp gates and such things, so it contains a massive amount of energy. In the cinematic and concept art I have seen, they glow brightly and create a light fog inside the golden ring, but I am not quite sure if I want to use that. Anyway, this is a picture of the current version:
Transparency can be a tricky thing in most of the software that I’ve messed with. You are doing pretty good with the glow but it seems a little too transparent for something that is suppose to be packing so much energy. Somehow, the crystal needs to look a little more solid and more absorption of light might do the trick.
When I was trying to do some glowing glass, I found that things worked better if I added some vertices to the center of my object and gave them the glowing texture because emission had a tendency to make my glass look plastic. Depending on how low on resources your scene needs to be you might even do a a whirlpool of glowing particles in the center of the crystal.
