Square Metal plate from top. How to make it look metal?

[Morne]

Hi all

I have a square flat metal plate. I need to view it directly from the top and there is nothing else in the scene (besides a light or two). For the life of me I can't seem to get the "metal look" I'm after. It either comes out flat grey or white. I need it to look like brushed stainless steel.

Any tips?

[Undersky]

A horisontally stretched / tiled noise map in the bump (and slightly in the reflection and glossiness slots) and an HDRI?

Or put some more vraylights or planes with vrayLightMtl to act as reflectors.

[simmsimaging]

You will need to add something else to the scene to give it something more complex to reflect. Metals are like mirrors in that sense - they only look good if the environment gives them something to show. On its own it will just be a pretty flat tone if the materials are correct.

Maybe try an image in the reflect override and see how that works, but flat surfaces are hard to get looking right (even a hint of curve makes it much easier). You will probably get the best results if you create some lights and some rough geometry to make a virtual 'set' to reflect in the surface.

b

[Alan Iglesias]

When I design a material from scratch, I often think long and hard about exactly what is happening with the surface of the material in real life, and then try to duplicate that in the rendering system. Brushed metal is a question that comes up often because of it's somewhat ambiguous nature.

If you look at it closely and depending on the particular metal, the brushed metal surface can have fairly equal amounts of diffuse and reflective elements.

As mentioned, the stretched (tiled in one direction) noise map is a good one for the diffuse map slot. Make sure you have enough small lines to make it look real. Also, Max comes with a number of bitmaps that look very much like brushed metal that you may want to use.

A surface in a complete scene will look pretty good reflecting the scene, but if the metal is alone like in this case then you'll need something to reflect, as has been pointed out.

You can use bitmaps and blur them with the Reflective Glossiness parameter, but that can slow render times and since the reflections can be just about anything in this case, I often use a noise map for the Reflection Override which is very adjustable.

Since the surface is flat, adjusting the "busyness" of the noise map (smaller size) will increase reflection detail and the natural blurred look allows you to keep the Ref. Glossiness at 1.0, keeping renders fast. You can also use the threshold parameters to adjust noise contrast for the reflective look.

As most of the reflection will probably come from the lighter areas of the diffuse aspect of the surface, use the same basic noise map as the diffuse in the Reflection Map slot. Adjust the balance between the diffuse and reflective aspects of the material by adjusting the noise map's threshhold parameters.

I usually add also just a tad of bump map again using the diffuse noise map to provide a little contrast and surface relief.

Then it's a matter of test rendering and adjusting until the balance you are looking for is achieved. Get a rough look that is good, and then add your Image Sampling, which will smooth everything out nicely.

I often think of these adjustments as analogous to applying traditional media and slowly "paint" the picture as I go with material parameters and light.

I hope this is helpful,

-Alan