Strictly speaking those "crystal" patterns are some slant in micro crystal structure . Perhaps better is to make it very subtle normal map variation rather than roughness and a little bit color one
Hey friendsI am working on a Solar Panel Material right now. This is my current WIP: I want to introduce a crystal like pattern, but have had no luck yet trying different setups. Any idea ? I have tried to start from a tile sampler looking like this:
I tweaked the color and roughness values a bit. @gnoop I try to establish the crystal in the normal map aswell. But according to my reference, some crystals "blink" with a very low roughness value. @jStins I am using PBR Metallic/Roughness and I am going to render in Marmoset, perhaps also in UE4 and Unity. Not sure how to…
I honestly do not exactly get what you guys are talking about. "Bend" normals, like having a very high difference in value/direction that each crystal has on the normal map ?
This is with the crystals in the normal channel. I tweaked the little stripe details down. Looks pretty good imo :) When I throw it into Marmoset I will experiment with the refraction maps etc, maybe I can get some kind of depth in there.
You want to take the grayscale values from your crystal pattern and use them to bend a normal. If you don't want to do the maths you could probably feed it into a flood fill then flood fill to gradient before converting to normal It'll still look lumpy without a clearcoat but will give you the sort of result gnoop…