How to make "Himalayan" rock salt chunks in Blender

Question

Dear experienced Blender users,

please help me finding a solution for the following task:

The material I am looking for respectively that I would love to know about how to create it in Blender is:

Rock salt.

Nice, pink-ish to orange colored chunks of "Himalayan" rock salt. You may know pictures like these:

If someone of you could enable me to get hold of a Blender material like this - it would help me so much to design items with or out of this material! As you can see, it is somehow transparent and allows light to go through, it is rough and some areas are "white" where the chunks collided with each other. Some chunks also do have darker "inclusions" as you might recon on the tealight. So, it's quite a challenge and would for sure cost me the next two years to find out alone... Your kind help and support would be highly appreciated and I want to thank whomever very, very much in advance already. Thank you and please have a nice day!

Spotty110

Edit01: Btw, (and Thanks to Duarte Farrajota Ramos' comment!), I am still struggeling to learn how to model some decent chunks - I'm worlds away from even opening the node editor for a material... Forgive me!)

Answer 1

Ok here is something I made awhile back. It is really involved and maybe overkill. But it is a great learning experience.

I dont have time now but I will try to update my answer to fill in more details.

Its too shiny but this should get you started.

I got a lot of tips from this user.

https://www.blendernation.com/2017/03/23/gemstone-sculpting/

He also did a tutorial on how to do the shader.

https://www.blendernation.com/2017/03/25/gemstone-shader-breakdown/

Here is the blend file to mess around with

Here is another more simple set up that looks pretty good.

and this is the Gradient node you will need to build.

Answer 2

I made mine with only the default cube (I'm a purist)

I added some modifiers to get the rough shape, deforming in the z axis to make a crystal effect.

I added a volumetric with absorption and emission seperated by a texture sphere to get the glowing center.

On top I have added a glass node to make it a bit reflective.

Then I added the trace salt crystals as a texture on top of that.

All together

Its best viewed as a cube though ;-)

Answer 3

I can't see the images, but I've got the stuff at home, so I know what you need. Start off with the base colors. Imagine a perfect version of a rock salt, polished and all. I'd probably give it a pink-ish diffusion and a white-ish specular. Add some subsurface scattering, too. Now on to the discoloration. Use a generated texture map to modify the diffusion slightly, and use another to mess with the normals. Add a few spots of crusty white all over with (another) texture map, this time actually texturing it. Rock salt has cubic striations, so add a bump map that mimics this.