Creating a gem material in UE4

Development Rendering
1

Hi
I am new to this forum and shading in UE4 in general.
I wanted to create a gem material in UE4 and I got a basic shader working by following the tutorial over here.
It is way off from what I want to achieve but atleast I have something. Here is the kind of effect that I am after.(Ref1 & Ref2)

I went further and made some changes to that shader in order to achieve the following:

  1. Make the gem glow from the its center and radiate outwards.Be able to control the emit factor for this glow.
  2. Be able to control the color of the interior details of the crytal independent of the glow color.
  3. Make it shiny.

Here are the issues with my material so far:

  1. The current emissive amount makes the entire crystal glow uniformly rather than appear to radiate from the center.
  2. Similarly, changing the color of interior details affects the glow of the entire crystal.
  3. The current crystal is more reflective than shiny.(I know that reflections are dependent on the lights in the scene but I am not looking for accuracy. Rather some fake reflections which give the illusion of shininess. Any alternate suggestions to achieve the same will be helpful.)

Here is my material: Gem material
And here are the textures used in the shader.(All credits to the original author.)

Any help will be appreciated.

2

UE4 is PBR, that means Physically Based Rendering. That means, the best way to make any article is to actually make it like it really is. In the case of a gem, that would be glass. Just use a decent glass material. The rest of the effect you’re looking for will come from two main sources:

  1. The shape of the mesh. This is the main place you need to concentrate. You need a mesh that has the facets modelled.

  2. Light shining through the mesh.

A real gem has no emssive. Once you have 1 and 2 sorted out above, a little bit of emissive might help, but it’s not the main area to concentrate on. :slight_smile: