Jedi Holocron

I initially started this project a to try and see if I could take a minimal detail model and play around with reflections/refraction in realtime. The goal was to use parallax on as little geo to sell the idea. After a few tests the parallax results I got were looking really good, and farily convincing, though once I started lighting and render tests, the biggest disadvantage/issue to this whole thing was the way that shadows interact with the parallax. Because of the lack of geometry, shadows just draped across the surface leading to a fake looking result. With the amount of ins and outs that the geometry is doing, not seeing the shadow follow along the surface in certain scenarios was just not going to work out. Reflections on the other hand seemed to do really well given that they're all screen space.
Ultimately I ended up reworking the geometry to take this to final, also realizing as that was happening that with the minimal geometry I would have limitations as well over what I could do with opacity, since I couldn't technically do 2 different materials without the geometry to assign groups to. Overall this was generally a really fun experiment and I learned a bit more about lighting/rendering in marmoset that will help a lot with my next projects :)