how to create a material that looks AND behaves like marble?

[blumentopferde]

Hello!

i have a big problem with maxwell render! I'm trying to create a marble surface. but i cant find a way to make it look realistic. marble has some interesting atributes: if we look at typical marble it is white and opaque and is nerved with a pattern in a different color.

but if illuminated from the backside, we see that it actually is transucent and that it shines in a yellow tone. apart from that we see that the marble texture is not superficial but penetrates the whole element.

easily speaking: if illuminated from the spectators side: opaque and white, if illuminated from the back side: translucent and yellowish

 

so there is an SSS-preset for marble in the maxwell material wizard. but it is quite useless to me. first of all it does not come with a pattern and applying a pattern on it turned out to be quite tricky as even a small preview takes eternities (i dont have a strong processor so i really mean eternities) to render with SSS materials, which makes it quite impossible to experiment...

 

my questions now:

1. how can i give a texture or pattern to an SSS material?

2. how can i make this pattern penetrate the whole thickness of the material?

3.how do i control the reflective color of an SSS material (for example if i want blend two different coloured SSS materials together with a weight map to simulate the coloured enclosures)?

4. is there a possibility to imitate such a material with a BSDF material to reduce render time?

5. is there a possibility to set translucency (instead of transparency!) to a BSDF material? all my tries with BSDF materials lead to transparent looking materials where you can still see the contours of the objects behind...

 

hope someone can give me some hints!

thx!