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Rendering Techniques > Creating a Stainless Steel Material with 3dsmax (Posted By: cgking)
:: Post Date: 2007-03-21 14:43:17 [Post Comment] [Post Articles]

Creating a Stainless Steel Material

Software Used: Autodesk 3ds Max

Author: Montree T.

Email:easyyong@hotmail.com

Introduction

This tutorial was written from my experience working on metal materials personal obsevations and from photographs.

There are 3 important things to remember when you create a stainless steel material.

1. Strong Highlight

Although the metal shader is the easiest way to create a stainless steel material, it has limitation in creating the highlight, so I prefer to use either multilayer or anisotropic, as we can play with its several highlight shapes.

Two layers of specular level on multi layer shader

The different between the highlight shape of the blinn shader and the anisotropic shader

Besides the really strong highlight on the stainless steel, that we can create by changing the basic specular level and glossiness parameter, I found that there is another strong illumination of light caused by the reflection on the stainless steel surface (the highlight appear inside the reflection) that also looks like another highlight. As this illumination doesn't have an exact shape, depending on the light in the environment of the reflection. i.e. Some appear like thin vertical lines and we need to use anisotropy to create such effect.

Faking the highlight in the environment reflection using anisotropic

Use First specular layer that we have in multilayer shader as a real highlight, so we can adjust only the specular level to be higher and lower and use glossiness to make the highlight look more obvious.

The First specular Level is the real specular and the Second specular Level is the one that appear inside the reflection.

I also make the Second specular level to be as strong as the First specular layer, but this time I adjust the anisotropy parameter to be higher so the highlight shape is thinner. The orientation will be changed as well if the effect of the anisotropy doesn't appear correct. ( The orientation is a value in degrees that can range from -9,999 to 9,999. Default=0.)

The different shapes of specular highlights caused by changing the orientations.

Put a scratch or brushed metal map in the specualar map slot for more detail in the material highlights.

2. Low Diffuse level

The nature of a metal is that it has strong specular highlight and reflection but it has a diffuse level scale (in 3ds max) lower than a normal shader (the brightness of the difuse color is less than normal). If we are creating the stainleess steel with an anisotropic shader, we have to make the anisotropy parameter lower than default. I normally use is around 25 - 70.

3. Motion Blur Reflection

The reflection on stainless steel is very refractive and blurry (for example it looks like a motion blur effect in photoshop). The best reflection map in 3dsmax is to raytrace, but I found no such effect in raytrace that is similar to the effect seen on stainless steel. Though we can use "multi resolution adaptive antialiaser blur", and the effect is similar to using a motion blur, it is not quite the same and it takes a long time to render.

Put a motion blur filter on the original environment map. (Note: This effect does not work well on flat surfaces.)

An alternate method is to skip almost all the detail in environment map and only recreate the strong illumination of the reflection highlight by creating a new reflection map with a linear gradient ramp. As the most obvious reflections on a stainless steel surface are the lines, this gradient ramp map should use the "explicit map channel".

Spherical environment gradient ramp

The reflection still does not look realistic as it appears in every part of the surface equally, so we use a falloff map to specify the fading of the reflection area.

Apply a falloff map over a reflection map.

This picture shows the reflection falloff when using falloff in the raytrace material.

The reflection is masked by falloff map. The fading distance is specifed by the falloff type. In the picture I used "perpendicular and parallel"

No reflection map produces realistic effect on a flat surface besides Raytrace. I sometimes use gradient ramp maps on anisotropy to fake the effect on flat surface. As the anisotropy appears in the specular highlight only, the gradient ramp will appear on the specular area only and fading into the diffuse and ambient area.

Anisotropic map

The anisotropy that appears on the specular highlight looks like a reflection.

Comments: (Currently there are 17 comments.)

[Anonymous]santosh ( 2008-03-28 05:05:02 ) [Post Comments]
good
[Anonymous]David Ghazawy ( 2008-02-12 08:17:31 ) [Post Comments]

hey Montree nice results and thanks for the tutorial. A few high res renderings would have been nice. I got some sharp results.

Just curious what rendering engine are you using in Max (I'm working with Vray)

Ghazawy

[Anonymous]Bunty ( 2008-02-01 20:39:42 ) [Post Comments]
Please if possible u provide this tetuial in vidio farm.

Thanks
Malik Zafar from Pakistan
[Anonymous]Brace ( 2008-01-09 10:37:36 ) [Post Comments]

Great stuff. It's not easy to follow, it demands a lot of figuring out for someone newer to this stuff, but on the other hand, it's explained deffinitely in-depth and I understand what's happening and why, and that's the best part.
Thanks for sharing. I made some cool material. :)

[Anonymous]peter ( 2008-01-05 16:56:17 ) [Post Comments]

Thank you!!!! Very useful! I've spent hours in maya trying to figure out how to get a descent stainless steel material and I easily got it to work in maya as well. Many thanks.

To the real "fucking idiot" who posted 2 posts down: The author went above and beyond what he needed to for free content. If you want step by step instructions then PAY FOR IT! I've spent tens of thousands of dollar in school learning all this stuff and this guide was made to help those who already know the basics. So sell your food stamps and put on your crotchless panties and go offer your services in your trailer park to earn enough to pay for the right education! And learn to respect those in the 3d community because if your nice you will get what you ask for.

[Anonymous]God ( 2007-12-09 10:31:21 ) [Post Comments]
To the numb thuck below. I didnt follow it well either, but he didnt have to share any of his knowledge with you. Appreciate it!
Oxygen waster!
[Anonymous] ( 2007-11-21 10:20:10 ) [Post Comments]
you are a fucking idiot. Do you know what a tutorial is? step by step instructions.

fuck you
[Anonymous] ( 2007-10-18 17:45:31 ) [Post Comments]

I found that very helpful.

A few high-res renderings would've been nice, so we could really see how the shading turns out.

On a side note, the reflection of the checkered floor, even with the falloff, seems a bit uncharacteristic for stainless steel to me.

[Anonymous] ( 2007-10-04 11:47:43 ) [Post Comments]

*whooosh*
That's the sound of this one going right over my head.

Great, highly technical explanation, but not very accessible tutorial.

I would have liked to see a more of a...
1. "Do this"
2. "Do that"
3. "Done!"

nema ( 2007-07-21 06:40:53 ) [Post Comments]
i wana get matrial ,mtb library.
[Anonymous]Pixels4Dinna ( 2007-06-22 11:16:10 ) [Post Comments]
Crazy what you can do huh
[Anonymous]ShafeeQ ( 2007-05-24 15:39:39 ) [Post Comments]

hey u are a master in 3d max, im trying to do this , im giving a big effort for do my self, still practicing, bcos, my habit i cant follow exactly how it is, i have to understand why, and why . each and every single point. so i hope it will take time, but , i like your explanation,
have a nice day. good luck for your futher works
shafeeQ

[Anonymous]phyothet ( 2007-04-21 15:53:07 ) [Post Comments]
This is what i need.
Thank you very much.
[Anonymous]suesh vinayak ( 2007-04-20 16:38:39 ) [Post Comments]
you are the best company for the max tutorials
[Anonymous]shoaib ( 2007-04-17 21:01:54 ) [Post Comments]
well in depth but not easy to digest i.e.follow
[Anonymous] ( 2007-04-10 22:13:25 ) [Post Comments]
Thank you for the good in-depht-tutorial
[Anonymous]dileep ( 2007-03-31 20:57:21 ) [Post Comments]
hai very good

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