Okay, so today I’m gonna share my experience with, uh, getting that “jade lightcone” thing working. It was kinda a pain, not gonna lie, but I got there eventually.
First off, I started by, you know, actually trying to find out what a “jade lightcone” even is. I did some digging, read a bunch of stuff, and watched a few videos. It seemed like it involved some kind of specific setup with lighting and materials to get a certain look, kinda like jade. So, step one: figure out the look I was going for.
Then, I jumped into my 3D software – Blender, in my case. I started by creating a simple object, just a basic cube, to test things out. I knew I needed to play around with the material properties to get that translucent, slightly green jade effect. So, I messed around with the subsurface scattering settings. That was key, I think. Cranked it up, adjusted the color, and kept tweaking it until it started to look kinda right.
Next up: the lighting. This was tricky. I tried a bunch of different things. I ended up using a combination of a few area lights and a subtle HDR environment map. The area lights gave me more control over the highlights and shadows, which are important for making it look like light is scattering within the object. The HDR environment added some ambient light and reflections, filling in the dark areas and giving it a more realistic feel.
Here’s where things got frustrating. The render was looking… okay. But not great. It was too flat, too dull. I realized I needed to add some imperfections. Jade isn’t perfectly smooth and flawless, right? So, I added a subtle noise texture to the material’s roughness channel. This broke up the reflections and made it look more natural.
After that, I did some post-processing in the compositor. Just some basic stuff: a little bit of color correction to fine-tune the green hue, and a subtle vignette to draw the eye to the center of the object. Nothing too crazy.
The biggest hurdle? Trying to make it look convincing in different lighting conditions. What looked good in one lighting setup looked terrible in another. That meant going back and tweaking the material settings, the lighting angles, everything. It was a lot of back and forth.
Finally, after a bunch of tweaking and experimenting, I got something I was happy with. It wasn’t perfect, but it looked like jade, and the light was scattering in a believable way. The final step was just rendering it out at a high resolution and calling it a day.
Lessons Learned:
- Subsurface scattering is your friend. Don’t be afraid to crank it up.
- Lighting is key. Experiment with different types of lights and angles.
- Imperfections are your friend. Add some noise to the material to make it look more realistic.
- Iterate, iterate, iterate. Don’t be afraid to experiment and tweak things until you get the look you want.
Overall, it was a fun project, even if it was a bit frustrating at times. Hope this helps someone else trying to achieve a similar look!
