Hi. I saw a tutorial video today on making marble in Poser.

I didn't like what I saw and figured I'd show you how to do it.

If you have Poser Pro 2012 or 2014, or Poser 10, you can get the same results as me, and that's better by far than I saw in the tutorial.

Here is the shader. Key points:

The reflection is blurred. Unless you glaze the stone, it won't make sharp reflections, so you need the softness to be non-zero.

If you're using lights you also need to deal with the specular reflections from lights. I prefer Blinn because I understand it and it always does what I want. Can't say that about any of the others.

My Blinn eccentricity and Reflectivity here matches well with the Reflect softness. If you change one you have to change the other. The relationship is a little complicated so I won't write it out. Rule of thumb though: As blur (softness) increases, eccentricity should increase and reflectivity should decrease.

I combine the two forms of specular (Blinn and Reflect) by adding them. This is for 100% reflection, which is never the case, so it needs to be modulated by Fresnel_Blend.

Fresnel_Blend assumes 100% when viewed on edge. But that's only for perfectly smooth surfaces. For a blurred surface that's too much. However, Fresnel_Blend doesn't have a "strength" parameter, so I plug it into a regular Blender, and adjust the strength there. In this case, I did .8.

I made some slight variation in whiteness using the Clouds node. This is optional or can be replaced with other choices. Have fun experminenting with colors and patterns.

The "Scale" on the Scatter can be adjusted to make the stone more or less translucent. Think of it like putting the "breaks" on the light. Do you want it to stop quickly - use higher scale. You want the light to linger and bounce longer - use lower scale. I used .5 here making it more translucent than the default. Try different values.

Use Gamma correction in render settings. If you don't, you'll think the marble is too dark and you might start messing with lights or (shudder) mess with the shader values. That would be a mistake.

 

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