Help rendering teeth and gingiva

[peterdahl]

Hi KeyShot community.

I am a software engineer with a background in real-time graphics from the games industry, who normally do all renderings within the real-time domain. I have often found it hard to benchmark my results, though, and are therefore evaluating KeyShot as a way to create reference renderings to compare to my real-time solutions. I must say that I am impressed so far, as KeyShot gives good results and is easy to work with. I did however run into a small problem when trying to render teeth and gingiva.

Teeth is a layered material that has enamel on the outside (slightly bluish hue), dentine in the middle (yellowish) and pulp in the inner layer (red). I am disregarding pulp, put as it can be seen in the photograph I attached, teeth should exhibit more of the dentine layer in the bottom of the tooth, and more of the pure enamel look in the top.
How can I setup such a volumetric material in KeyShot ? I am hoping to avoid textures, but the use of ramp textures could be an option.

Currently I have tried to setup the surface color to the slightly yellow dentine color, and the scattering color to the more blue enamel color. This does help a bit, but I feel sure KeyShot can give me better results than this.

I have attached my material settings and a screenshot of my real-time view. I am using the Conference Room env to light. I am currently still using the trial, so I show the real-time view instead of the rendering to avoid the watermark. I realize there is a difference, but the overall point still holds and should be visible.

Any help and ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
- Peter

[KeyShot]

Your material settings look reasonable. I would suggest working on the lighting. The photograph has a dark mouth in the background and one light source in the front. Your rendering looks like it has lighting all around? Try working with one of the studio light settings. Rotate the environment until the light is in the front. Also, you may want to increase the translucency of the teeth even further. Finally, having a closed model will help with the translucent material if you want to capture the subsurface scattering from all directions.

-- Henrik