I’m having a heck of a time trying to create a “silver metalic” metal for some furniture legs.
Reference Photo:
http://bit.ly/1t2w2g1
http://bit.ly/1t2w8El
I *think* these finishes generally have a pretty high IOR? But what is giving me trouble is trying to balance a metallic look with fairly dull reflections. I’ve also tried using a falloff map in the diffuse slot, but don’t understand it enough to make it work right. Any help (or even a .mat file 
) would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Check out Siger’s free materials. There’s pro versions they sell also, but the free version is 0.6. The free version has a couple of nice metals in there that you can use as a starting point. Stuff like stainless steel, chrome, aluminium etc
Do a search, I can’t remember the site on top of my head now…
Metals don’t have the same fresnel as non metal objects have so IOR won’t do the job you want currently. You’re better off using the ward shader in the vray material, using a flat grey colour in the diffuse, and a flat grey in the reflection amount slot. Keep fresnel turned off entirely and then use your glossiness to control the dullness. The ward shader gets soft quicker than the default blinn so you won’t need much glossiness.
Yep, what John said. If it should look more reflective you just lower the diffuse brightness.
I use fresnel on everything. Ultimately if you need full reflectivity at 0 degrees then you just crank the IOR right up.
High IOR, low glossiness value with Ward as your shader, and possibly a very fine bump map if you’re getting some close-ups. Should do the trick, really.
Hmm, it does a weird dip towards the edges due to the method vray uses - there’s a different vray fresnel map planned that has the complex ior options but you can do pretty well using a falloff map too.
Oh yeah duh, one big thing is metals only really look like metals when they’ve got something to reflect. It’s the same with people asking for a good looking glass material and being frustrated when they get settings from the forums and they still look boring. Metal and other reflective objects are really about what’s around them being reflected on the surface - often it’s strips of light or simple gradients of black and white just to generate some changes over the surface of the object.
That site always frustrated me. The memberships were confusing, the recover password doesn’t work… I jumped ship on that site years ago. I just checked it out again and all my email addresses are in use and the password recovery still doesn’t work.
Wouldn’t this be a classic case for a blend material where a sharp reflecting metal is blended with a soft reflecting material using a falloff to control the blend between the two (as opposed to fresnel)? Diffuse colour should be black in both cases.
(and stick a vrayedgetexture in the bump in both cases set to about 2 or 3 mm)
Siger’s membership plan was frustrating to me too, but there’s some really good stuff there that’s saved me tons of time.
I have v2.5 of the shaders, and that what I was starting with as a basis for the metal legs. John’s advice seems to be doing the trick, however, it looks like if I do use an IOR Fresnel of 20, it seems to “richen” the metal somehow. And yes, if I put some hidden v-ray plane lights here and there, I can get a nice rim light or reflection that looks pretty natural IMO. Anyhow, I’m curious about the blend mode of two different reflection rates that Richard mentioned. I’ll have to play around with that one.
It’s actually a metallic paint you can make a similar one with the car shader or try this one it should be close to what your looking for.
I’m still on 2014, so it won’t load for me. That’s okay. I think I’m pretty close with what I’ve been able to come up with.
Try figuring out a glossy value that you like for the front surface, then a glossy value that looks good on the sides, then put a falloff map in to the reflection glossiness slot and use the black and white colour swatches to put in the two values you liked. If you liked a value of 0.8 for the front bits, then multiply 255 (white or 1.0) by 0.8 and stick in that value in the front falloff colour. If 0.95 worked well for the sides, then do 255 * 0.95 and put in whatever value that was in the side colour value. Play with the falloff curve to tune the transition between the two. It’ll be more render efficient than doing two shaders and blending.
I think Tricky has the answer, though I would use dark gray instead of black. You can see two reflections on your reference, one that is clearly fresnel, and one that seems ‘straight’. I would use a blend using ward as joconnell has mentioned, and the coat material with straight non-fresnel reflections. It would be longer to render as well, as he also mentioned.