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| 3D Nuts! Tutorials - Creating gold, silver, and copper materials |
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In this tutorial you will learn how to create gold, silver, and copper material. Key terms include reflection, specular, index of refraction, fresnel, and fall-off. This tutorial is aimed at both beginners and professionals. Although this tutorial is based on 3D Studio Max, the same settings (such as the RGB color values) apply to many other 3D products.
In my search for gold material and other metals such as silver and copper, I noticed there are a lot of different opinions on how to create them. There is probably some truth in most of them, but since many of those opinions conflict, they can't all be right. I'm not saying I'm right either, I'm probably not actually because there is always room for improvement. I've read several boring papers and done about 40 test renders (that takes about two eternities on my PC) before I got acceptable results. Let's just say that the examples below work for me and with or without a little tweaking they might work for you too.
If you don't feel like going thru all the steps in this tutorial, you can download a matlib (.mat) file for 3D Studio Max thru a link at the bottom of this tutorial.
Note: Click on the thumbnail in each step for a larger screenshot that includes the viewports and the relevant portion of the user interface.
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Create a new sphere and place it in the center of the Perspective viewport with Radius 30 and Segments 40 On the Left viewport, move up the sphere as shown in the screenshot.
Open the Material Editor (select from Rendering menu or press M key) and assign the first material to the sphere and rename the material to Gold 24k.
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| In the Material Editor click the Standard button (next to the name Gold 24K) and select Raytrace from the list. Change the Shading type to Blinn. |
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| Set the Diffuse color to RGB 70,40,0. |
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Set the Specular color to RGB 255,240,215. Set the Specular Level to 100 (for now)* and Glossiness to 65.
*In a completed scene with lighting and other objects in the environment you probably want to set the Specular Level to 0 and have an object that emits light create the specular reflections in the gold object. |
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| Click on the empty square button next to the Reflection color, select Falloff from the list and click OK. |
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Set the second color (click the white box) to RGB 255,200,100.
Set the Falloff Type to Fresnel, and set the Index of Refraction value to 15. |
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| Press the Background button to display the colored checkerboard and get a better idea of how it will look in a scene. |
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Now click the Go to Parent button and scroll down to the SuperSampling section of the material.
Enable the Enable Sampler option and choose Max 2.5 Star or if you have a fast computer choose Hammersley. |
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Next, let's makes some changes to the environment as the gold won't look good in just a black environment. It needs something like another object to reflect.
Select Environment from the Rendering menu and set the Background Color to white. Close the Environment dialog box. |
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