SAND TEST

After I had read the nice article about Pixars approach to creating sand for the shortfilm Piper.
Here´s the link to the FX-Guide article https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-piper-daring-to-be-different/

I tried to create the same exact thing using OctaneC4D and Octane Scatter. In the Renders you see up to 5.000.000 individual sand grains. I created 5 different sand grains. 3 Different materials: Glass / Rough glass, Subsurface-Scattering and Glossy (diffuse + reflection).
In each of the materials I controlled color (that I sampled from the Pixar albedo photograph) with a random color shader in a gradient.

I also controlled the roughness of the materials with a random color so I got some variation there.
Pixars results look a bit nicer. But I believe they had more then one day to find tune their result.
The model of the shell can be found here: http://threedscans.com/shell/ramose-murex/