Major Project: Gem Spike Animation Test #1

To make my crystal/gem molecule represent the idea of Anorexia better, it was suggested to me to look at ways to 'weaponize' it or to make it suddenly become dangerous and hostile. To do this, I experimented with animating the height so the displacement would become more extreme - causing the highest points of the map to become spikes. Unfortunately, I cannot preview the results unless I fully render it which took a while due to the reflections and refractions. It still came out quite grainy because I didn't want it to take forever but I'm going to need to keep this in mind when it comes to rendering because certain materials will need more time than others. I like how the texture looks even more so than before because I can actually see how the light appears within the gem (this has the same setting as Gem 018 only with slightly different colours).

Because of how displacement works, it appears like the object is smaller when it becomes spiny so I may do another test where I play with the scale of the object as well so it stays the same size or even gets larger as it becomes more aggressive. I may use a simple material for that test though so it doesn't take too long to render. I looked into previewing displacement in the viewport but it does not appear to be incredibly accurate. I followed this article to try and improve it, but even then it doesn't seem that the preview updates when you change the height values. I'll look more into this, but I hope that this preview well help me a little bit.