Powder Coated Steel Material
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Dec 5th 2024
Updated On: Dec 5th 2024
Software: Blender or 3dsmax (vray)
Here's a tutorial on how to create a basic powder coated steel
material.
Reference
This sort of steel is used frequently in industrial settings, like for
example the shelf below. The powder coating is sort of like paint on
the surface of the metal, but is baked on, which creates a
thick, tough finish that is more durable than conventional paint.
Software Agnostic Material
The basic ingredients are as follows:
- Shading: Regular Diffuse and Spec
- Color: Almost Black
- Spec: super low gloss reflections (blurry), high intensity
- Bump: a high frequency noise
Ways to make it more realistic:
- Replace the bump procedural noise with a triplanar with a
more complex bitmap to simulate more variation in the noise, including
small knicks and scratches.
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 0.25 so it has very blurry specular
reflections, and the tint was adjusted ever so slightly to get the
right intensity of reflection.
Finally we want a small noisy bump. So create a Bump node, hook in a
Noise Texture, and hook that into a Texture Coordinate node. Set the
Coordinates to Object, so you apply the noise in 3d space. Increase the
Scale of the noise to make the noise very small in comparison to your
object. Reduce the strength of the Bump node so it's not too bumpy.
Then hook the Bump node into the Normal input of both of your shaders.
Here's the resulting render.
Here's the blend file, Blender 4.2: powder_coated_steel_material_blender.zip
3dsmax (vray) Example
Here's the shader for 3dsmax for the vray renderer renderer.
I start with a VrayMtl.
Set the Diffuse Color to black.
For the Specular Reflection, reduce the glossiness (0.6) and make the
reflection color a light grey. This will create a glossy (blurry) and
not too strong specular reflection.
Now comes the bump, I just used a noise map set to fractal, and a
very small bump size...
Here's the resulting render.
Here's the max file, 3dsmax 2022: powder_coated_steel_material_3dsmax_vray.zip
