The best way to make metal

CookieKingHoi

What's the best way to make metal? currently I use the clouds filter and then the sponge filter, but it doesnt really look ok.



So, am I doing something wrong here, or is it just me?

Showster

Try working in some high lights and shadows, specularity, reflections, scratches, dirt /grime and general surface wear.

Those filters are alrightish to start of with, but you have to add alot more to get a better representation of metal .

Keep going

MoP

Try mixing parts of photos of metal (go out with a camera and find interesting surfaces, take high-res photos if you can).
Just add them as a new layer and change the blending mode to quickly vary the surface. Using Photoshop filters and tools by themselves without lots of heavy manual painting is never going to result in a realistic look.

Eric Chadwick

This might give you some ideas.
Hard Surface Texture Painting - by Stefan Morrell

Dante1217

i think that the problem may be that it looks more like clouds than metal, cuz if you look at real metal, (like the kind you are trying to re-create) u notice that it is made of many flakes, some small and some large, and most times, about 1/3 to 1/2 of them have a higher shine or specular level. just my thoughts.

Mark Dygert

There are so many types of metal, its hard to have one specific way to make it. But it almost always involves specularity of some kind. MoP and Eric have some great suggestions and you should follow them.

It is also really important to nail down exactly what kind of metal it is your trying to make. What that metal is used for, how long it has been in use and what kind of environment it's been in. Some metal is preserved in some way with paint or a coating, and then things get more complicated.

As you get into it and discover what makes metal look like it does, you'll learn its more about observing and less about "what settings do I use for filters". MoP had a really good suggestion of taking your own photos. This is something I've been doing for a while and at times I sit there and stare at something figuring out a few of those questions. Doing that has done more to expand my knowledge and ablity to recreate materials.

One other thing you can do, which I find handy for all materials, is to recreate procedural textures in 3dsmax/Maya. You can apply these textures quickly and use them as a base to start painting your diffuse. Depending on how you set them up it can be really handy for things like wood grain concrete and metal. The work great as a base because your UV pieces don't always face the direction of the wood. Causing people to try and flip rotate and align complex patters over several pieces.

But if you set up the procedural material correctly you can bake the pattern into the jumble saving you mountains of time and takes care of your seams.

CookieKingHoi

EricChadwick wrote: »

This might give you some ideas.
Hard Surface Texture Painting - by Stefan Morrell

Very interesting, seeing someone's workflow is really helpful, only problem is that I model in wings3d. I might upgrade to max once (already have ps) but wings does not allow me to make ambient occlusion maps, any way to get those on a diffrent way?

Mark Dygert

www.xnormal.net
XNormal bakes out AO and normal maps. It's stand alone, and its free. The creator also posts on polycount quite a bit.

jogshy

The metals are always problematic. I think you can start getting some photos of iron, gold, aluminium, etc... but you're gonna need reflections, specular, anisotropic lighting and rust.

For some fakes, see these links:
http://photoshoptutorials.ws/photoshop-tutorials/textures/metal-texture.html
http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/photoshop-metal-texture
http://www.newtutorials.com/rust-texture-tutorial.htm

And don't forget to visit reference images sites like istockphoto, etc... I think the best option is to use real images as reference... then just layer and retouch them in a program like Photoshop or Gimp.... although you're gonna need to play a lot with shaders and BDRFs to get a result like this one:

Vig wrote: »

The creator also posts on polycount quite a bit.

Yep yep