Dear all,
I am completely new to this forum but I hope you can help me out with a project that I’m working on. I want to recreate squid skin in blender, but I cannot seem to get the shading of its translucent skin right. The cell patterns need to be animated (I’m thinking of either raycasting or using instances on points), so it is just the underlying gel-like flesh that I’m occupied with right now. Does anyone have an idea which shader settings to use to get the right translucency?
This is what I did so far, but it seems still very artificial and does not have the nice milky white interior that I want
Hi, this sounds like interesting and very challenging project. I am no expert and still experimenting with textures/materials, but i can see that the displacement of the skin is to high/rough for the smooth shiny skin in your ref.
You will also probably needs layers of transparency within the skin.
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To me, this looks like the principled bsdf’s “transmission roughness” could do something like that rather than using volumes. Those settings seem to get me close:
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Dear both, thank you for your replies!
I have tried a bit, and found a shader that I’m quite happy with. The only problem: on smaller objects it looks great, but larger objects start to look like empty plastic bags. How do I create a solid interior from this model? I tried the solidify modifier, but that just creates a smaller shape within the large one.
This is on larger scale
If you want a jelly material to look solid, it needs to have refraction. If you are using a principled shader, set the ior to something above 1 and use transmission for the transparency rather than alpha. If you are using a custom shader, it should not be mixed with a transparent bsdf.
In real life, the only time you would see a transparent object without noticeable refraction is if that object is very thin.
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…and assuming the inside is filled with nothing but air/light gases.
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Have you tried using subsurface scattering? Perhaps using an image texture, or other texture in combination?
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It was in relation to not showing refraction.
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IMO, you need an opaque core with the transparent material on top of it like a shell.
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You could try one of my translucent shaders…I haven’t had time to work up the patterns as yet but a simple Voronoi smooth f1 should be the first node to play with…
EeVee only for this file… haven’t worked it up for cycles and might not unless I have to later on…It should be fine with your HDR!
Squid-Base-001.blend (1.0 MB) Blender 3.3 file
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Thank you so much for this! I will definitely check how I can implement this shader into my work! I do want to render in Cycles though so I might have to do some tweaking along the way.
The cells I want to animate very specifically, so that won’t be possible with just a voronoi texture. They need to display text at some point, so i will probably do something with geometry nodes although i still have to figure out how i’m gonna do it exactly. But for now thank you again for this amazing shader! Can’t wait to play around with it 
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