Better reflections for anodized metal (or full IOR support for standard materials)

Hi,

I try to setup an airplane interior and run in the problem to get a bright anodized aluminium. Here the metal opener at the luggage storage should be blurry silver and not dark.

Here how it looks without blurry reflection

And so it looks in white plastic

The simpliest way would be if I could use the IOR of the plastic material and use high values like 8, 12 .. 20 .. 30. So, I could adjust the IOR until I get a mix of metal and plastic effect. Not perfect, but better than the dark one. But the current standard material of Rhino ignores the IOR parameter.

And other way would be that very blurry metals are using an other calculation method. Like at the real world very blurry metals should collect the information from a very wide angle, in this case also from the bright ceiling. Maybe the programmer have an idea.

-Micha


PS: Maybe now it will be confusing … :wink: … some years before I played a little with the Renderman shading language and I created a very simple blurry metal shader. The problem was, that blurry reflection was slow and noisy calculated. But I got an idea and used the programming code of diffuse(..) not in standard normal direction diffuse(N). Instead I set diffuse(R) - it means I calculated the diffuse lighting based on the reflection vector instead the normal direction. The result was a clean and quick calculated very blurry metal effect. I needed the “new diffuse metal” as basic for a metalic car paint shader. At my hard disk I found an old image where I showed the result. It would be fantastic if this old experiment could be used for Enscape, maybe for a new car paint shader. :wink:

And here an other old example of a material based on diffuse(R)

I’m still very curious about this topic. Wouldn’t it be useful for Enscape? At AIR it save me a lot of calculation time and gave me a great look.

IOR directly translates to F0 that is controlled via our metallic parameter. Right now, not all parameters are accessible via Rhino, since we use the normal Rhino material interface. But that’s something to come, we just haven’t found a good solution yet beside of creating an additional material editor dialog.

Please also look at the shader coding stuff. Blurry anodized metals are looking to dark in interiors and maybe the shader trick can be used for some materials (keyword anodized?).

Good luck for the additional material editor dialogs. Please let it me know if you need screenshot from other plugins as example. I could post Vray, Octane, AIR.

We too are struggling with Anodized materials, they look awful in night renderings and take a long time to “clear” up.

@sdbrownaia You could try to lower the rendering quality for night walkthroughs to “Medium”.