Ice and Crystal material

nero_angelo

I would like to make a crystal Material and a ice material:
ICE


Crystal:


except that I know myself as materialBut I am unable to find for this.
Could you help me find a way to create this material?
(sorry for my bad english:()

whooosh

Is this similar to what you're looking for?
http://vimeo.com/22727152

Vailias

Some of those look colour enhanced, but the general principle between them all is the same.

You're going to want a material with:
a low to medium specular exponent. Between 4 and 10 for a default phong implementation.
A coloured transmission mask modulated by a dot product between camera and surface normal.
Depending on how complex you want to get you could build a custom lighting solution that can replicate the internal scattering of the ice, and its highly diffuse nature in directions other than directly light facing, OR you could fake something similar by putting the ice color into the emissive channel, modulated by a low exponentiated dot product between camera and normal. The trouble with that solution is it will look very strange in low light conditions, as you're basically making the ice glow.

That should work well for the first, second, and fourth pics. The crystal picture can go a couple ways. The easier way would need need its transparency controlled by a camera vs normal dot product, with exponent control for the width of angle acceptable

The more complex, but nicer looking, way would be to use a real time generated cubemap, then take the inverse of the surface normal and add it to the camera vector, normalize that, then feed the result into the cubemap for the resulting texture lookup, which would essentially fake refraction. To add some control you could create an index of refraction variable that you could alter the overall vector addition by, multiplying the normal by the index before adding it to the cam vector and normalizing, thus increasing its overall contribution to the direction of texture lookup.

Ace-Angel

Just put a an emssive map in key locations and bake the emssive light, while feigning a light opacity.

As Valias said, those crystals are 'boosted', so you can get away with alot of simplicity in the materials just by using the basic nodes, a few camera nodes if you want to get fancy, but I don't see clear relfection in those images. A more serious and real looking crystal will require your own lighting solution, with internal scattering solutions, OR you can just create layers of mesh, assign each on a different material ID, and create several materials in UDK and keeping each one simple, but making sure they work with each other and assign to said mesh/s.

nero_angelo

Ok thank you, if you have some better idea or tips , do not hesitate to say ^^ .

Entity

If it's going to be static I would just do it in max/maya and bake it into a texture.

feanix

Entity wrote: »

If it's going to be static I would just do it in max/maya and bake it into a texture.

What!? That's nuts! There's no way you can get the look he's after with baked textures.

For the crystals you want a very bright specular highlight (greater than 1) and you want a specular power of about 15.

If you make the material 2 sided and transparent you're going to run into a lot of triangle sorting problems and it will look bad.

You could also just feed a fresnel node into the distortion input to get some refraction going.

Entity

It's doable, you could take advantage of the sss materials available in max/maya to get the frosted ice look and bake that down with general lighting (or the final scene lighting) Works pretty well for static objects.

Vailias

unless you can see them up close or move around them Static background ice a simple bake like that could work.
Any other situation it will be noticeably inaccurate as.. well everything about the crystal will not change. Course if you're looking for stylized ice then sure, bake or hand paint away.

Visceral

This would be a excelent time to play with the new sub surface scattering features in DX11 !

Will Faucher

Entity wrote: »

It's doable, you could take advantage of the sss materials available in max/maya to get the frosted ice look and bake that down with general lighting (or the final scene lighting) Works pretty well for static objects.

It would look *terrible* if you can walk around it. If it's static/far away, then maybe. But otherwise, there's no way in hell that will look good. You'll need to get fancy with cool unreal shaders to get a good-looking effect.

Entity

Yeah I guess so, I'm not much of a game artist. Coming from a vfx background everything is baking and projecting

Ace-Angel

Entity: Material baking is extremely flimsy, as it's best left to far away static objects, or thing which will be viewed from single angles. Remember that Materials are dynamic, especially in the case of crystals and in a game, the player can get around them.

Visceral: It could work, but the questions remains if they have a DX11 card or not and just how flexible the current SSS material functions are.

Entity

I wonder how the ice in FF13 was made, I remember being quite impressed by them. Cryengine also has a good ice shader, although it is quite heavy.

nero_angelo

Entity wrote: »

I wonder how the ice in FF13 was made, I remember being quite impressed by them. Cryengine also has a good ice shader, although it is quite heavy.

Yes , the ice and crystal shader From FFXIII were very impressive, I wonder again how they did it .
edit: some screenshot:

Ace-Angel

They just gave it high amounts of noise specs tiles and boosted up the bloom...I don't see any distortions in the 3rd image, which ice usually has naturally. Also, fog...

Which reminds me, did you try the distort function in UDK?