Heavenly Fire

This is the staff of Heavenly Fire - an incredibly valuable magical artefact made of rare materials.

This project was an incredible opportunity to explore interesting materials in Arnold. The design process included lots of research into the surface properties of precious gems and metals. The main factors really were reflection, refraction and iridescence/opalescence.
A volume shader was used for the wings giving even more scope for exploration. The main things here was to get the density and colour right to fit with everything else and the wings went through many iterations before arriving to their final look.
Finally a quick fluid sim for the fire and it really felt complete!