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Here is your ultimate material challenge:

Abalone Shell


I've thought about it long and hard, and I can't really thinik of anything, that would live up to a REAL Abalone Shell.


ANY ideas?

Coating layer with a thickness map

I'm into building musical instruments, virtual and real. I'm really into blue green abalone. Here is an abalone material I did several years ago. It's a little dark. And it's just a color map made from a photo of ablam. I'd love to get the material to catch the light like the real thing. Somebody, make me a wonderful abalone material, please.

http://resources.maxwellrender.com/sear ... v2=0&tipo=

Nice, @rshanks now, we just need to add the 'special effects'

@David Solito
I agree coating with a height map is the right way. BUT... the heightmap would have to change dependant on the viewing angle... or something along those lines...
or multiple 3 dimentionally layered coating maps...
Since from what I understand of the material, it works similarly to a dielectric mirror, just with a lot of imperfections.

What you would need is a 'structural colour' which creates colour more rich than any pigment because of how the micro texture interferes with the light waves.
thin film interference is similar but not 'deep' enough.
in that regard there is no real function for this at the moment but I bet there is some kind of cheat workaround...
I might try it out some time

I made a nice one, I will post it tomorrow (have to leave work now)
Jules

I did this while my monitor was in the wrong gamma so tweaks would help a bit, This was just from a low res image I found on google but I guess it works ok,
It does actually react to different angles and catch the light nicely, This was just a test but I think with a bit more trickery it could be improved.
let me know If you want me to upload it:

Keep going,.. light pollution in the map you have now makes it look like print upon metal, but its going to be hard to make neutral maps to allow the real light interaction (I suspect 2 coatings with different normal maps and different thickness maps might get close)



This is a photo feynmman...

eww this is hard! There must be some anisotropic effect, I think its angle map would be blurry wavy and random, there might be a correlation between aniso-angle and thickness of coatings, prob not worth considering, have to draw the line somewhere...