Lava/snow materials for UDK Thread

Hey. Okay so I need some help. I've been trying to get a lava and snow material to look good in udk but it's just not turning out all that impressive. I'll just post the lava, don't want to spam it with images.

Here is the material editor part for my lava. Any suggestions? (The normal actually just made the color a little pleasing really). Maybe what I ought to do is figure out how to make the brighter parts emissive and the darker parts not, so it will look more like real lava that cools off and hardens up.

Edited by: Aimforthehead

The colors in the lava looks nice but like you said make some clumps of blackish, hardened rock. Then add some a few small white blotches. If the white doesn't look good then maybe just the rock. After trying this post up the sample. Sorry if I'm not too much of help. Just throwing out a few ideas.

Yeah I just don't really know how to do that. Know any way?

Probably by editing the texture you used. I haven't used the material editor in UDK much. So, use anything that can edit textures.

Look at pictures of lava, see what makes it up and replicate that. Check out games that have it. I know the oblivion world of TES:Oblivion has lava lakes stretching onward.

This tutorial goes into similar attributes using some math nodes in the material editor. Primarily the first half is what I'm talking about; it uses cloud maps to create distortion, kinda like what MoistCatFlaps is saying - getting the effects of black clumps. Make the cloud map a little more intense and you kinda have the control of lava going on.

This post has the same sort of dilemma. A picture from said post.

Lastly, experiment heavily with it. There's many types of lava out there, I'm not sure which you are trying to acheive (be it basaltic, felsic, etc.).