30.Beneath the sub surface

I decided to go back into the lava lamp file and start again with the shader. It seem the more I experiment the more knowledge im gaining about its fine tuning of the output effects.

Here is a base layer again, not looking very inspirational. 

Getting a good frame to work from is half the battle to seeing what all the shader looks like 

here i have added some lights in the base to ramp up the amout of light being fed in to the particles.

I like the viscous feel these next images have, though they seem a bit too solid to be lava lamp wax

At this point i think i was taking a few steps backwards, i was having some problems with the light bouncing off the top of the cap and making the top of the particles lighter than the base, breaking the visage of a lava lamp with its light source being in the base.

getting better..

another step back

I made some bigger changes and mixed up the colour of the lava to be more yellow and i got some really nice effects. 

I then fixed the lighting after a few attempts, but i was also getting a few holes in the mesh here and there, so looking into that i discovered that having the mesh in tris was not working to i switched them to quads

You see the white marks at the back? those are the missing polys, took me a while to figure out how to get rid of them. 

I was very happy with this render so i decided to do an ambient occlusion on another layer

I then composited it in Photoshop and had a play, above is the end result , which i think looks really nice, maybe too solid or needs more reflections. This is rendered without the glass so that might help too.  

I then became intrigued as i have never really rendered out any more render layers other than ambient occlusion, so i followed a few tutorials and got to grips better with the functions and can now do a batch render with mutiple render passes. I had tried to use it in an animation last year but to no avail.

http://www.cgsource.net/render-passes--compositing.html

With the master beauty layer rendering out pretty much the same image, i was a bit curious as to why it was better to do passes, so i did a bit more research and found out all baout how it gives you more control and allows you to make colour changes without having to rerender the whole scene.
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/maya_render_pass_concepts_and_techniques_whitepaper_us.pdf

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/passes_layers.html

Here is one of the specular passes which i thought looked pretty cool anyway, might do a chrome type animation after the project is done, would look like molten magnesium!