Copper

I’m really trying hard to achieve a nice copper material.

I am currently tweaking the one i’ve already used in some projects.

It has a few maps, and a fresnel reflection, which is probably wrong since it’s a metal, but it looks nice. I get the nice reflections on the sides, of the dome and i can still see the clear brown color on the front. When i tried it without using fresnel, everything got either lost in reflections, so it had a strong blue tint, or the reflections where so subtle that it was hardly noticable.

The thing is, i’m not really sure how to set up a scene to properly test a material such as this.

So i have it a shot with a simple sun+sky outdoor enviroment which i guessed will be where i’ll be using this material the most.

I was simply amazed when i saw how awesome it looks when it’s reflecting the plane. Since i was tweaking the material for a while, and decided to add the plane when i was done tweaking, i couldn’t pinpoint if it was just the reflection, or the tweaks that i’ve done. Well, it was just the reflection.

It looks poor when used properly.

Since im kinda confused by the first image - the sphere is overall brighter, it even looks like it’s reflecting something on it’s very top, i was wondering if there might be a way to tweak the material, so i can fake the appearance in the first image, but using just a skylight as a reflection source.

In other words, the material looks perfect but only in very special conditions. Using this as a guideline do you have any suggestions on what should be done next?

copper has orange speculars…
One more courageous step

Lele

and i think its still a bit too reflective. i notice the photo doesnt have that much of a highlight on it. can you share that material?

for copper I would make a vray material,

brownish diffuse,
slightly orange reflection (probably best to make it a noise map with two different oranges that are slightly different, one orange, one a bit more red)
fresnel reflections
ior: 7/8
ref: .7/.8

see how that looks.

Photo, highlight?

he means the hot spot I believe, lower the ref glossiness if the highlight glossy is locked with it, or lower the highlight glossy to something like .6

i wouldnt lower the reflection glossy, i would lower reflection itself. coper isnt too reflective. forgive me if im wrong, the 1st image is not a photo?

:shock:

Wow thanks.

It’s not a photo, it’s a detail from the hi-res rendering that i’ve done for this project:

Church in NC

It’s basically the same material, which i tweaked a tad more for the other images. [/url]

hahaha, I figured it was a render, but thought I would let you say that before I said anything. Its a great closeup though.

dont know why but the copper in that 1st image looks bang on

I think it’s because the sun is pretty low, and the form is spherical.

This is the same material, and it doesn’t look as good, especially on the cone roof.

Looks pretty good in the render, but the spec needs a color tweak.

Perhaps check out a few of the coppers on vray-materials.de