In the spirit of Halloween and returning to an Octane workflow, I jumped in to doing a fun little texture study with my favorite Halloween candy - CANDY PUMPKINS. My love for these addictive sugar vegetables cannot be understated, likewise for my love of endless subsurface experimenting.

Here's the end result in motion:

And a few beauty stills:

The texture is relatively simple but at the same time rather convoluted due to the fact I'm on an older version of Octane thanks to hardware limitations. 

The final shader is two mix materials masking float values onto where scratches should and shouldn't appear. The pumpkin bowl model from Turbosquid contained one single UV diffuse map that I based all my masking off of. A simple SSS mix with some phase and density adjustments, and separate mix with a combination of scratches pumped into the roughness and bump channels. Pumpkin candy definitely has that subsurface translucency, but if a strong light source is present, a fair amount of specular shine reflects from it's glazed coating. Below are a few development stages of the SSS and bump map testing.

Little loop showing the gradual changes - a few polygon displacers also helped grow the scale so the pumpkin models were actually touching each other, also looks a little thicker.

I killed my first sequence about halfway through exporting when I developed a much better looking shader after more tinkering. That move kind of ate up all my remaining time, since SSS on two 980 Ti's takes an eternity to render. 

Because of that I can easily admit this shader could be much more realistic given more time. I kept some actual pumpkin candy on my desk for reference, but as you can see in the still below, the entire top green portion of the texture has no scratches at all, or barely any coming through from the float: 

Also the scratch resolution is questionable when close up, was more or less designed to be seen at the distance in the animation. If you compare this render to actual pumpkin candy, you'll see the surface details in the real world are actually very messy and irregular. Large bumps and mistakes from the candy mold, a bit more bleed on the green dye into the orange corn syrup, higher gloss at certain angles, and more pronounced ridges too unlike the model I used. 

There are also at least two different types of popular pumpkin candy in the U.S. during Halloween - mine is textured and modeled more like the popular Brach's version seen in the photos below. The other popular version has much taller green stems and a shorter orange section. They actually taste slightly different too. 

I'd like to perfect this texture down the road, in addition to creating a realistic candy corn texture - and maybe throw in a few dynamic sims with both sloshing around or something fun. There was also some annoying tiling thing going on in my normal channel so correcting that would be great too lol.

Thanks for looking, and follow my Instagram @hunter_kudjo for more!