Gem Material (Amber & Rings)

After having trouble with the amber material and knowing that the material for my gems looked a little odd too, I spent some time trying to get it right. The main problem was the material looking like thin glass rather than a solid transparent object. I found this tutorial that helped me a lot.

While the gems are more transparent that I would like them, it was still very useful for the initial setup and learning about the different blending/rendering modes as well as learning about shader complexity.

I using the tutorials setup, I was able to play with a lot of the values and find a good mix of all of them. Other tutorials I have seen had all inputs lerped but I decided that keeping only the refraction on a lerp was perfect for what I needed.

The end result was a great transparency level, let the colour from the mosquito through and still looked like a solid ball.

I duplicated this 7 times for the 7 gems I am using for the Dwarf-rings and pulled the 7 base colours from each of the materials I already had made for each gem. This material worked great for the gems as well once I had played with some of the input values and reset the refraction to the tutorials suggested range.

Using an enum, I was able to have this material change from the blueprint rather than having 7 separate meshes with the 7 variations. I also applied this logic to the One Ring, allowing it to be viewed with and without the burning inscription.

This all allowed me to tie up some loose ends with the project that I was saving until a later date and has overall made my project very streamlined with the materials and blueprints. I'm very happy with the result of this material that I can adjust and apply to other things in the future.