Major Project: Sugar 001-008

I spent some time looking over what lines of my poem I have been creating materials/objects for and which ones I have not spent time on yet. I realised that the last stanza of my poem (When I think of hope...) hasn't really been touched yet. I decided to try creating sugar/a sugar cube. I initially began working on spheres like normal, but I found it difficult to determine if I was having success or if it just looked like snow. For the first 3 tests I swapped between spheres and cubes (although I forgot to save the square version of Sugar 003).

I did some research on how to make a sparkle effect to my material, and found a few pages about adding aiFlakes under Coat > Normal. The settings in Maya were different than what I saw in the articles online, but I just played with it anyway. I like how it came out so far, I think adding a bit of subsurface scatter with a beige/cream coloured radius really enhanced the texture (which is probably why 008 is my favourite).

To be sure this material is working alright I may try a turnaround style animation to see how the sparkling sugar crystals look. I could also try making it more like brown sugar so it doesn't resemble snow too much. In my own time I've also been experimenting with the Shrinkwrap deformer so this texture may be a good one to use when experimenting morphing shapes using Shrinkwrap.