Material Fail Times

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I was working on an acid type material, well here it is in all it's glory.... yeah, not so much huh. Several things wrong with this but I've been working on it for like two weeks now and I really need to get on to something else otherwise I'll be stuck tweaking this for the next couple of years probably. 

So the things that I think are most wrong are the material not really looking how I had wanted (I'll elaborate on that in a minute) and the steam coming off of it. So everything then :( 

With the material I started out approaching it much like you would a water shader as I thought that would be an appropriate approach. The main problem with that is that with a water shader you much more rely on the reflection map and the normals and the diffuse is quite often a block colour. Which with the material I created just doesn't work, it looks more like some yellow coloured milk. It wasn't until I hit a mental block and played through DmC and saw how they did a similar style of shader. They had used not only a panning material in the diffuse but had a coloured reflection map so that the colour altered depending on the angle you viewed it from. They also had a panning material round the rim to give it a bit more of a visual impact. 

Then on to the steam. My main issue with it is that there's just too much of it. I think it's a little too overpowering and distracting. It makes it difficult to really see the material or even the bubbles on top. Which I would probably just leave to the bubbling normals in the material and maybe imply a quite violent liquid through the use of a splash flipbook or something. I also had trouble with the colour over life. I tried to make it yellowy at the base, as the smoke would have inherited a lot of the colour from the material, then fade it out; as I tried making it all yellow but it was far too strong as there were some many sprites. If I had far less sprites I think it would have worked much better. 

But onward and upward. No such thing as a complete failure, I know what not to do and how to improve it for the future but for now I'll get on a work some more in cascade for a change.