Brushed Metal Textures in Blender
| Author | darek |
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One of the most-requested materials for blender is brushed metal. So, here it is!
Create a New Material
- Select your object with RMB.
- Go to the Material Buttons().
- Add New Material.
- Set the Color of the material to a dark gray.
- Copy the Shader settings below. Spec and Hard control the highlights. Ref is reflectivity, in practice it make the material lighter or darker. Tangent V
is where the magic happens. If this button is pressed, blender
stretches the highlights of an object along its tangent. Exactly what
we need for a brushed metal surface.
- Turn on Ray Mirror. Set RayMir to 0.2. This makes our metal reflective.
Your material should look like this by now:
- Now Add New texture.
- Go to the Texture Buttons().
- Set Texture Type to Clouds.
- Turn on Hard Noise. Set NoiseSize to 0.3.
- Go back to Material Buttons().
- In the Map Input tab, turn on Sphe. Set SizeY to 75. This is how we get the horizontal grooves.
- In the Map to tab, turn on Col and Nor. Make the Color to a medium gray. Set Nor to 0.2.
- Render!
Note
that results vary greatly depending on what type of lighting is used.
Lights with Ray Shadow on tend to cause ugly jagged edges.
Hope this is useful.
This work licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.
You may redistribute it as long as you give the original author credit.
You may redistribute it as long as you give the original author credit.
Submitted by coyote (not verified) on Sat, 03/22/2008 - 20:51.
Yes, this is useful.
Although, the reflections are not really correct.
As specular highlights are anisotropical, so should be the actual reflections of other objects too.
(after all, specular highlights are just faked reflections of the light sources, aren't they...)
The last rendering seems especailly unrealistic - the objects seem like they are partly of brushed metal and partly of polished metal.
I don't know what the "Tangent" button at the "Map Input" tab is exactly for, but I suspect that it could be used for anistropic mapping of textures. Perhaps non-raytraced reflections (envmap) could be used with this somehow to get enviroment reflect anisotropically?!?
Sorry if this does not make sense. I'm pretty new to rendering in general, and Blender in particular...
Submitted by darek on Sat, 03/22/2008 - 22:28.
I understand what you are saying.
Really, the main problem with the last example is that it only uses only one light. I was surprised to see this when I opened the file. Adding more lights makes:
I also quickly implemented your suggestion, and it improved the render a little more. (blend file)
After I wrote this tut I found a couple of useful resources. This is a page I stumbled on, on Blender.org.
This technique isn't perfect, the surfaces should probably look smoother, but the main advantage over most other techniques is that it's simple: one material, one texture.
Submitted by coyote on Sun, 03/23/2008 - 18:49.
Well done Darek!
Non distorted environment reflections are still there, but are now much less visible.
I searched the internet for brushed metal tutorials and I think the best are the following. Although they are not for blender they could show useful for understanding reflections...
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/brushed_metal/brushed_metal.htm
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/metal_and_refs/metal_and_refs.ht...
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/aniso_highlights/aniso_highlight...
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/chrome/chrome.htm
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/aniso_ref/aniso_ref.htm
The guy is doing the best approach in my opinion - he photographs some real world situations and then studies them.
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