Maldon Sea Salt Flakes ?

Hello everyone,

I am currently trying to visualise salt in a container but am failing because of the texture. Do you have a tip for a material that would be good to use? It should have a displacemant so that it doesn’t become too smooth at the edges, but I’m not getting anywhere.
Do you have any tips?

Hi,

Do you have a real picture of what you aim for ? It’s always better to have a reference.

Best

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That makes sense, of course.
It doesn’t have to be a close-up like this, but it should have a sharp-edged, critical structure.

This is the way I tried it, but it’s only moderately good

I would try to start with a cellular node and play with the shapes sliders.
Maybe with two nodes and a color composite to get different sizes, or play with levels and level scale

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I pointed @philipp.baumgartner to your topic since I just rendered some salt which I think would be pretty close to what you want.

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@oscar.rottink thanks for tagging me on this.

I tried to achieve it with Flakes instead of Displace.
It is also in the Geometry column and it gets you closer results to your reference picture than Displacement.
Hope that helps.

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Good hint, thanks for the contact

ok, i am going to try this!

Hm, the geometry does not run

You mean in the realtime view?
It should work. Did you execute it?
Don’t know how big your geometry is, but maybe try to reduce the size of the flakes as well, 2mm might be too big for the geometry, or the other way round, way too small.

The material just seems to become invisible …
I have a 100x100 mm surface, which should actually fit. Does it mean something that the box around the material is red? Is this an error message ?

Ah, okey, that is the problem.
The Flakes node needs a 3-dimensional body to execute, so a 2d surface won’t work.

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ok! i am going to try that, thanks!

I would use a combination of flakes with the option UV enables and kind of a translucent material.
The UV option enables to use texture to drive the shape of the flakes. Or with some other tweaks, it could look like this.

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Thanks for the detailed explanation, it is always very helpful to see the structure in the material graph!
I have solved the whole thing much more simply, I think that works for my purpose