trouble with chrome and composite materials in 3Ds Max
polycounter lvl 6
I was trying to figure out a way of creating a material for a model in 3ds max ... uh ... how can I put this ...
part of the model/material can use bitmaps, bumps, normals, etc but part of the material is like chrome
actually i was tying to figure that out to how to make a nice chrome material. attempted looking up tutorials on the subject ... but still had trouble with it.
thought that I could use composite in the material to have a material that's partially bitmap and partially chrome
I guess I could use what I currently have now but it's too clean and crisp, there must be a way of applying some form of weathering to the material. I'm not certain what to do.
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for chrome someone suggested just using a greyish color and messing with things like specularity. but chrome isn't just grey and specular; it does this wierd thing where it sort of refracts light or something right. some tutorials i saw were ... either difficult to follow ... or resulted in some sort of compatibility issue. like one tutorial was using vray, i dont currently have access to vray. another one was using some sort of default mentalray material - which doesnt mesh well with the compositing materials. I dont know what to do
it be fantastic if i could get my hands on some sort of sample material and maybe inspect it to see how it was made or something, that be great
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here's some stuff I was trying out
http://imgur.com/a/MSl17
part of the model/material can use bitmaps, bumps, normals, etc but part of the material is like chrome
actually i was tying to figure that out to how to make a nice chrome material. attempted looking up tutorials on the subject ... but still had trouble with it.
thought that I could use composite in the material to have a material that's partially bitmap and partially chrome
I guess I could use what I currently have now but it's too clean and crisp, there must be a way of applying some form of weathering to the material. I'm not certain what to do.
-----------------------------
for chrome someone suggested just using a greyish color and messing with things like specularity. but chrome isn't just grey and specular; it does this wierd thing where it sort of refracts light or something right. some tutorials i saw were ... either difficult to follow ... or resulted in some sort of compatibility issue. like one tutorial was using vray, i dont currently have access to vray. another one was using some sort of default mentalray material - which doesnt mesh well with the compositing materials. I dont know what to do
it be fantastic if i could get my hands on some sort of sample material and maybe inspect it to see how it was made or something, that be great
------------------------------------
here's some stuff I was trying out
http://imgur.com/a/MSl17
Replies
MentalRay Arch&design shader has some presets built in, chrome being one if I recall correctly. A very important factor when building/testing highly reflective shaders is the environment that they reside in: i.e - what are they reflecting? Using a .HDR environment is the best way to go. As you can see in your image, your objects are sitting on a grey plane so your chrome is completely reflecting that.
You really need to go back to basics as shading is quite a complex subject. MentalRay and Vray material properties are very similar so don't discount Vray shading tutorials out of hand. But you definitely need to do some study on the subject. I haven't used MR in years but I remember Max documentation used to ship with a very informative help file on MR materials.
but yeah Art renderer is pretty new to me I literally don't know anything about it. Guess I should look into it sometime