I've been learning Blender for the last year and have so far been able to find every bit of knowledge on the internet except very few specific things (I don't know a single other person who uses Blender at my level or even close). One of those specific things that has proven to be surprisingly difficult is a material for hot glue. Sadly, not the scorching, clear, glassy stuff that comes out at first, but more like the dried, dead stuff at the nozzle's end in Img 1. Notice the translucency and the blurred white reflections at the edges.
Img 1:
A couple things that occurred to me in my attempt to make it...
The first thing that I tried was a straight-up Glass BSDF with some roughness (produced Img 2). The second thing that occurred to me was to add a Volume Absorbtion node as well (produced Img 3). These create a decent result, but it just needs that extra kick to photorealism.
As if there needed to be more constraints (not the Blender kind) (there does) (I'm sorry), the nodes will need to render nicely at fairly low samples (210 Render Samples --> Path Tracing or 50 AA Samples --> Branched Path Tracing) and render on GPU (no Subsurface Scattering or other purely CPU nodes). I'm really stuck here. Any thoughts?
Img 2:
Img 3:
I just thought I'd throw in that I'm trying to create a toy catapult for Physics because the teacher threw away our actual one. Img 4 shows what I've got so far. As you can see, the glue is the only thing that doesn't meet my standards (yeah, I know all of you geniuses (genui?) could critique the rest, but please don't for the time being) (I also know that the rubber band passes through the spoon).
Img 4:
.blend of catapult (note that I packed the textures, but they are from textures.com, so don't run away with them):
