help with "shiney" metal
polycounter lvl 4
One of my teachers gave us an option to do the door from the starcraft 2 intro cg...he showed us some of his former student's work including this one...I'm going towards a steam punk-ish style for my starcraft door...
What I can't seem to figure out is how he got the specular on the glossy surfaces to glow like actual metal...I thought it was some settings with the glossy texture channel in Max...I was not able to find much info on creating a gloss map but from what I could find metal would need a low gloss...I was trying to figure out how to do this but several hours and tries later I still can't get it to look like 'shiney' metal....
these other screen shots are my maps and light set up...thanks again for any input...project is due friday night if any is offering critiques
What I can't seem to figure out is how he got the specular on the glossy surfaces to glow like actual metal...I thought it was some settings with the glossy texture channel in Max...I was not able to find much info on creating a gloss map but from what I could find metal would need a low gloss...I was trying to figure out how to do this but several hours and tries later I still can't get it to look like 'shiney' metal....
these other screen shots are my maps and light set up...thanks again for any input...project is due friday night if any is offering critiques
Replies
Your gloss needs to be B&W which represents the material difference of your specular.
Your specular needs to represent the strength of the shine.
Also, MR? What material? Settings? I don't see your render, could you post it?
I applied a cube map to the material and it reflected off of the entire door O.o
I changed the Gloss to pure b&w (in pic)
Changed the spec as well....less black per Gsokol and it really helped....I can see it clearly when I turned the gloss up to 100...
MR? Mental Ray Renderer - Blinn Material...
and this is the render...it's pretty much finished...teacher isn't requiring this extra step but it's bugging me that it's the last thing that will make it 'pop'
http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2007/10/making-better-metal-with-miamaterial.html
(but yeah, echoing what everyone's been saying, really)
You can see that I use a dark diffuse. From left to right I try various settings to make metal based on your values in your spec/gloss map. If you use a high gloss value you will get a pin point specular, implying a mirror like reflection. While this may be true for the real world material of many metals, it needs to be faked for games/real time solutions. As the image continues right, you see I play with different spec levels and gloss values. But nothing looks right until you hit the far right and the extremes. High contrast spec (white) with a very wide gloss (dark grey) works wonders to fake metal. The final right image is the same settings as the one next to it but you can see that with some lights in the scene, the values I chose add up to a decent faked metal. You can, and should, use true reflections to get the best metal, but this is a good starting point.
I was not able to set the gloss to 256 but the specular I was able too...never knew the spec went pass 100 O.o
Now im going back to tweak my maps to adjust....if I could send you a cookie over the internet i would
@Quack! I tried what you did as well as trying different lighting...learned something
@cptSwing: I was wondering about adding color variations to the spec map...what kind of colors should i use?? an inverted color scheme of the diffuse map? the color of what a real metal reflection should be? or just random colors??? I was experimenting with this but could not get a 'cool' result..
@Scruples: "use a MR material instead of stock blinn." I've never thought of that...thanks!
@r_fletch_r: thanks for the link !!
Is this another stupid default in Max's default shaders or am I missing something?
He's doing a render, no point in using hacks when you can actually do it right with better results.
(not to jump on you personally, it just seems silly to use realtime hacks when you can use a physically plausable solution which is easy and gives better results.)
I don't think for Specular you would need to go over 100, but for a specific case, I recall that you need to set your Gloss to 256 or 512 (not sure which number).
This had to do with MR and something about them removing shaders akin to the ones found in Iron Man causing some issues with other materials.
Again, extremely long time ago, so I think it's fixed right now, although I got used to using 256 as my natives values in Specular and Gloss, so I compensate my maps to these numbers, so that might help.
once again...thanks
most of those disabled shaders are enabled now. they simply were not tested enough previously to include in the vanilla package. I've been using them for years and have had no issues with them.
Personally I'd avoid the standard material for realistic renders. It's out of date and really shows it.
No offense taken. But since we are talking about hacks...should we be encouraging him to NOT use specular then, since it is just a hack also?
Congrats onto finishing this Notes!
" illuminated plane infront of your mesh, a technique mostly use in car renderings (photo studio like) and play with tones of grey in reflection maerial by adding noise, Smoke, speckle procedural maps"
that sounds foreign to me atm cause im not that deep into my 3d learning...we we're to just supposed to use what we know and I wanted to learn normal maps, spec,gloss this quarter so I had to do that on my own...next quarter should be better
the A&D shader handles specular correctly thats why i was suggesting it.
Well shit, I learned something today! Thanks for the info.
i actually meant color variations within the black/white range in this case, smudging or scratches for instance. but yes, if you want your specular highlights to have a different color, you could use a full rgb specular map. a blue tint might work for metal, or reddish/orange hues. if you're not using copper or bronze or anything though, it's not an absolute necessity imo, especially since coloured spec maps can be a bit of a headache at first.
and here's a cool link with more information: http://www.manufato.com/?p=902
man, i love the speckle effect in mental ray's car paint shader. my 30 second attempts to reproduce it in a regular shader haven't been too successful, unfortunately (car paint is way too reflective for my taste)