Dirty Rusty Decaled Painted Worn Metal

[soulburn3d]

Added a new material and accompanying tutorial to my website called Dirty Rusty Decaled Painted Worn Metal. This is the same material I showed off at this year's CAVE conference / Autodesk University 2013, and it's the main material I use to shade anything that's metallic, painted and grungy (ie, almost all of my stuff), and it's all ready to be applied to your models. If you need a robot, a weapon, a guy in power armor, construction equipment, etc, and you want give it high quality texturing without the need to set up UVs, this is the material for you (currently Max/Vray only).

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_educat...worn_metal.htm





- Neil

[Neilg]

That's a serious setup, thank you very much! The UV tricks are great. Can already think of a few things i'd like to use these techniques on

[soulburn3d]

Thanks! Ya, it's a bit complex at first, it could be a lot simpler if max had a few extra maps, but its map selection is quite limited, so instead I have to hack stuff together But after you've used the material a few times, it's actually pretty quick to apply it. Please post anything you use it on, would love to see.

- Neil

[yyk]

Wow, gonna have to check that out.. really interesting stuff, thanks Neil!

[joconnell]

Really nice run through Neil and the various bits on blended box mapping are definitely going to come in handy for the next few things I'm working on. Just curious as to why you're using fresnel on your metal shaders? I kind of find it makes them look a bit pushed or fake with any conductive material not exhibiting the same falloff curves as a fresnel - a flat colour or a custom curve is way more realistic in most cases.

Either way fair play for publishing your approach, makes a lot of predictable, repeatable sense!

[soulburn3d]

Wow, gonna have to check that out.. really interesting stuff, thanks Neil!

No problem!

Really nice run through Neil and the various bits on blended box mapping are definitely going to come in handy for the next few things I'm working on. Just curious as to why you're using fresnel on your metal shaders? I kind of find it makes them look a bit pushed or fake with any conductive material not exhibiting the same falloff curves as a fresnel - a flat colour or a custom curve is way more realistic in most cases.

Glad you like it. The Blended Box Maps are really useful, so hopefully they come in handy for you too. May one day max finally get it built in as a plugin!

For clean metals I would probably just go with a flat color or a IOR so high it might as well be flat. But I've found for grungy metal that are meant to look a little old and beat up having a little fresnel seems to help. Just like how the metal has a little diffuse color to it, it's just there to simulate some of the worn feel before things get really worn with the dirt layer on top. But feel free to change it to your own preferred settings, this is meant as a base material, if you have a way you prefer doing it, change my defaults and use the parts that you do want.

- Neil

[squintnic]

This looks great, Im going to put this to use right away.