Dark specular materials

[zga042]

Applied to many different objects, a default specular material will show as transparent on edges or on thin sections of geometry, but darken and grow opaque the further 'inside' the geometry it goes. This is not intended for a clear, glassy material. (For SSS it is, but I'm not trying to do that.)

I'm having trouble recreating the look in the attached image. Changing the index to 2 helps, but something is off. In other renderers, they had a 'thinfilm' option for these kinds of situations. Is there anyway I can get the 'shell' effect of the material without having to actually shell out the geometry?

[bepeg4d]

Hi zga042,
what are your kernel settings and specular material parameters?
Could you share some screenshots, or even better an example scene?
ciao beppe

[zga042]

Project file:

necrogen.zip

(567.61 KiB) Downloaded 119 times

Directlighting:

PMC:

[zga042]

The specular material in this scene is a layer of water ontop of the dirt texture. This is the final look I got through PMC, Photoshop, and much confusion. But I have no idea why it wouldn't work using direct lighting, and furthermore how to get the kind of bright, clear interior retractions in the first post.

[bepeg4d]

Hi zga042,
unfortunately, without textures, especially HDRI, it's impossible to have the same lighting condition
Are you wuth v2 or v3?
The fog settings are a bit strange, I think
ciao beppe