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By Mihai
#394058
Got a request for zirconia ceramic material - the kind you now see on watches for example. Looks almost solid but very bright and flooded with light. Here are two tests I'm pretty happy with (polished and rough):

Image

I tried to make it as efficient as possible with the SSS - both of these are at SL 17, the polished one is a bit slower to render. But at least they don't need SL 22 to look clean. Comments? :)
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By choo-chee
#394059
those look great. getting a material like this is one of my old-time problems (usually solved in post). if you can explain a bit, that would be very nice.
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By Mihai
#394062
Here's another test (straps don't have this material applied, only the body, I hope at least that's visible :P ):

Image

I'm going to put this material and a few variations for sale on my site soon, but the idea is that making it SSS only would take a really long time to clean (because it would need a very bright and high scattering) and since it looks so solid already I'm using a little bit of SSS and "separating" the shinyness to another BSDF. So the SSS is just black refl0/90, roughness 0. This gives you only the SSS effect but no reflections, and this by itself renders pretty fast, especially if you only blend it about 30-40% with a regular BSDF. Then on top of that a layer in additive mode for the shinyness. You need to be a bit careful with the reflections because with sharp reflections in additive + SSS below it can give you noise, so lower the layer weight of the additive layer. The other advantage to having reflections separated is you can control exactly how much you want, or how rough, without affecting the rest of the look. It just seemed the best way to go in this case. If it was a less solid looking material I think I would have just made it all SSS.
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