Silver material

[WWX]

Hi, I don't know if I am missing something our haven't switch a setting on or off, but whenever I try to make a silver material and using Fresnel it comes out pretty much black.

If I cranck the IOR valuve way up it does improve but still does not look very realistic. (also surely if its done right the metal would look right with the correct IOR value)

Hope to get some help and if you need more info please let me know.

Thanks

[Dynedain]

Try using a falloff map in the reflection slot instead of fresnel, that way you can adjust the angle threshold at which point the reflections appear

[Da_elf]

just out of curiosity. do you have reflections turned on? or just fresnel?

[WWX]

Reflections

Hi Da_Elf,

The material has a almost white colour assigned to the reflections slot and under the Option roll-out of the material editor Trace Reflections is selected.

On the render dialog box under Global Switches the reflect/refract is set to active.

Dynedain, how would you go about determining the angle that you want. I have used the falloff map in the past with similar results. Seeing how nice everbodies else's metals look I must be doing something wrong.

Thanks

Geo

[Da_elf]

for silver i usually use a very light grey material close to white. then have my reflections up around 3/4 the way up towards white. the i would have an ior of about 4 with glossynesss of about 0.7

[flipside]

is your environment totally black?

[WWX]

silver

for silver i usually use a very light grey material close to white. then have my reflections up around 3/4 the way up towards white.

Da_elf, just to check I understand you, do you turn the diffuse colour to a light grey? I have mine totally black with the reflection slot colour white, maybe I am missing something here but I thought that reflective surfaces like silver and mirror the diffuse colur must be black?

Flipside, the Max environment colour is black, but I have the VRay override switch on and a Bitmap placed in that slot.

P.S. thanks for the very nice tuts on your page.

[Dynedain]

Re: silver

for silver i usually use a very light grey material close to white. then have my reflections up around 3/4 the way up towards white.

Da_elf, just to check I understand you, do you turn the diffuse colour to a light grey? I have mine totally black with the reflection slot colour white, maybe I am missing something here but I thought that reflective surfaces like silver and mirror the diffuse colur must be black?

Flipside, the Max environment colour is black, but I have the VRay override switch on and a Bitmap placed in that slot.

P.S. thanks for the very nice tuts on your page.

Silver doesn't really have a full black diffuse since its not 100% reflective, neither is chrome or mirrors for that matter. For silver a midtone diffuse works well.

[WWX]

Thanks Dynedain

[olitech]

WWX,
you can also try your original material (black diff, white refl.), fresnel 'off'...but instead of entering a numeric glossiness value,
slap a falloff in the glossiness slot (perpendicular or fresnel up to you)
Below are examples of falloff from black to white
and grey to white...forgot which is which tho



BTW Elf: i'm now officially addicted to the edit button

[joconnell]

Another key point is pretty much any shiny object is really decided by the environment it's put in - to make a shiny object look good you have to give it something interesting to reflect - for example if you put a gradient ramp into the environment slot, set it to use a spherical environment as its mapping type and put in a load of random grey, whites and blacks you'll get something interesting to play over the surface of the object. Alternatively you could have a simple flat plane in front of the shiny object placed behind the camera (quite large in size) with a simple gradient and one or two large vray area lights - make sure they're visible so they reflect in your object. Here's a good reference for this type of thing - based on the scanline and will trnaslate to vray - http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_educat...ome/chrome.htm