Polished Metal Material
By Neil Blevins
Created On: June 19th 2002
Updated On: Dec 12th 2024
Software: Blender or 3dsmax (vray)
Here's a tutorial on how to create a basic polished metal
material like chrome or gold.
I highly recommend reading my Specular Reflections
tutorial first, as it will discuss what a specular reflection is and
more physics and theory on the subject.
Reference
Here's a chrome pot from my kitchen.
And some examples of gold
Software Agnostic Material
The basic ingredients are as follows:
- Shading: GGX Shader
- Color: Almost black Diffuse Color, remember the more specular
reflection, the less diffuse reflection, so diffuse color is black to
compensate for a strong spec. The brighter the diffuse color, the more
it will look like an
alloy, ie, a mixture of a metal and another material
- Spec: perfect glossy reflection.
IOR between 5 and 10. Spec color is the same as the metal.
Ways to make it more realistic:
- Add a triplanar map of smudges in the spec to show small
variations in reflectivity.
- Add a bump that shows small knicks and scratches using a
triplanar projection map.
- Add a large wide bump to show larger warble in the metal, see
this tutorial: Flat
Metallic Surfaces
Remember, half of what makes a material
look like a particular material is the environment it's in, especially
if it's highly reflective.
A wise person once said reflections only look as good as the
environment the
object
is reflecting, keep that in mind.
Blender Example
Here's the shader for Blender...
So the Principled BSDF is set to default values.
Then the Base Color is set to black.
The Roughness is set to 0.0 so it has mirror specular reflections. IOR
is set to 10. Then Make sure IOR Level is set to 1 under the Specular
area.
Here's the resulting render.
To get gold, color the Tint in the Specular section a golden color.
Here's the blend file, Blender 4.2: polished_metal_blender.zip
3dsmax (vray) Example
I start with a VrayMtl.
Set the Diffuse Color to black.
For the Specular Reflection, set the Reflection Color to white, keep
glosiness at 1.0 and set the IOR to 10. This will create
sharp intense reflections.
Here's the resulting render.
To get gold, color the Reflection color a golden color.
Here's the max file, 3dsmax 2022: polished_metal_3dsmax_vray.zip
