HOW CAN I CREATE A LAVA MATERIAL?
Katy Roberts, UK
Creating a lava material isn’t as difficult as you might imagine – you can use Blender’s internal nodes. This type of material is principally used for the creation of fluid simulations (this render is taken from a fluid simulation that I created), but can also be used for static objects and characters.
Using this, you can go in the Node Editor panel and add a new Material slot.
Once you have deleted the default panel, add the following nodes: the shaders Glossy BSDF and Emission, the converter Colorramp, the vector Mapping, the internal texture Musgrave Texture, a Mix Shader and last but not least, don’t forget the Material Output. After adding these elements, you can start creating the final material.
First of all you need to mix the shader Glossy BSDF with the shader Emission using the Mix Shader. After that, you need to link the Texture Coordinate with the Musgrave Texture (generated to Vector) and then connect this with the Glossy shader. The next step is to connect the Texture Coordinate to the Mapping (Normal to Vector) and this one to the Colorramp and consequently to the Emission Shader. The penultimate connection is between the Musgrave Texture and the displacement of the Material Output. Then connect the Mix Shader to the Material Output. Once you’ve finished connecting all the different elements, you have to fix all the different values of the material. In the Mix Shader, set a value of 0.300; in Glossy set a roughness value between 0.400 and 0.500; in Emission a strength value of 6.000; in the Musgrave Texture the following values need changing: Scale: 60.000, Detail: 16.000, Dimension: 1.100, Lacunarity: 50.000, Offset: 1.000 and Gain: 1.000. In the Colorramp, create a shade consisting of red, orange and yellow colours. For the Vector Mapping, the values depend on the mesh in which you applied the material. In my case, I set these values in the Scale, X: 0.500 Y: -0.500 Z: 1.500 and my lava material was complete.