Crystal Shader for Maya

darkmanx_429

Does anyone have any tutorials on how to make a Crystal Shader in Maya?

Any specific specifications for rendering?

Does anyone have any tips on texturing crystal in Photoshop?

throttlekitty

What kind of crystal, or what look are you going for? Pics of the real thing would be helpful if applicable.

.Wiki

Basically its like glass. But the IOR is much higher.

-Take a Phong Shader.
-Set diffuse to nearly black or a dark bluish tone
-choose a nearly white specular and refraction
-set IOR to 2
-for some irregularities you could get away with a small amount of grain in the bump-slot with a cubic projection
-another way to improve the imperfection is adding fog into the crystal, mentalray has a nice setting for this.

this should do the job quite well if you have proper geometry.

Note that you maybe need to set the refraction to nearly white to if you are using a renderer which handles specular and reflection seperatly. But if you are using mental ray with the mia materials these should be combined to one value.