I've been trying to make a metal shader lately.

Some of the results are looking ok to me, certainly good enough to use in my own renders. I thought I'd post a few renders to show you where I'm up to with it.

This is iron.

Brushed copper

Hammered gold

Gunmetal

A bronze

You can add rust too ...

lookin good 

All these variations and more are controlled by a few parameters in the shader tree

A nice shiny chrome :-)

A rough gold?

A brushed stainless steel

I'll stop there, but you can see that it's possible to make all sorts of metallic effects with these few parameters.

Thanks at Renderosity as at other Places.

lmk

I saw those when you posted them on legume's newsgroup - very nice IMVHO.  one question that may be inevitable - can you reduce diffuse colour on the uncorroded metals, so that they're mostly reflective?

I have 19 "traditional" metals, as accurate as I can get them.

Nevertheless, for purposes of fantasy materials, you can mix diffuse and specular reflections. Some examples in green here.

Here is the candy finish in red and some other colors.

The candy finish is:

A base metallic layer, somewhat blurry

A transparent tint layer that alters the color before and after it hits the base metallic layer. The color intensity of this layer depends on viewing angle - simple geometry. I covered the effect in the BBNylon thread.

A clear gloss top coat.

Bill, are those bricks on the first image procedural too? 

Attached Link: http://metalflakecorp.com/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=31&page_id=27

Just two remarks:

The transparent candy paint always contains one or more flourescent pigments as a "secondary" color mixed with the transparent non-flourescent main color. This creates an interresting color changing effect depending on the angel of view.

Sometimes the candy paint itself also contains metallic flakes or mica.

And second, the base coat can vary from a very finely grained to a very rough metallic paint of various colors. (Most commom are white, silver, gold and black)

Quote - Bill, are those bricks on the first image procedural too? 

I wish. No they're the first image here:

http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=17707

I daresay snarly deserves a thread of his own for these metals, however in re: candy-apple car-customising paints, word on the street is that they require a special sprayer for the base coat (metallic paint) as the aluminium flakes are larger than those found in ordinary metallic paints.  n.b.: when one uses the term "metallic layer", it doesn't mean a metal surface, rather the paint sprayed on a primed metal surface AFAIK.

I love all of them! I wanzit all, my precious! :)

Attached Link: EZMetals

NB: It is for Poser Pro 2012 and Poser 9 only.

It will not work properly in earlier versions of Poser.

If anybody can find any use for it, then consider it released into the public domain.

Thanks! Very useful!

Thank you! I will play with it!

Quote - I have been studying multi-layer materials.

These look amazing.

I will definitely take a close look at this.  I am into the habit of changing metal surfaces for procedurals.  This may absolutely be handy.  Thanks.

SG - Have you tried building shaders with matmatic yet?

Thank you for the freebie metal mats Snarly!

Love that they are for IDL renders!

SG these are great! BB, eagerly awaiting your material package as well!

Quote - SG - Have you tried building shaders with matmatic yet?

No, not yet. I keep thinking I should though.

Perhaps surprisingly, I feel a little daunted by it. Then again, I usually find things are much easier than I'd imagined, once I decide to do something. Maybe it's time to give it a try.

Quick question: do you have any control over the layout of the nodes when using matmatic or is the positioning all automatic?

You can control the layout. Each node has a pos attribute, which is just an x,y tuple. If you assign a pos to the node, it uses it. If you don't, it calculates one.

You can also decide which nodes are open or closed, and which nodes show a preview.

Nodes identified as parameter nodes, via the PM or PM2 or PMC functions, will automatically be placed on the left side of the page.

Note that messing with node position somewhat dilutes the value of using matmatic.

For example:

candyColor = color ** (1 / (.1 + .9 * EdgeBlend(1, 0, 1)))

There are four nodes in there - to position them explicitly you'd have to break that nice clean expression up into many more.

Here's something to try - not a complete candy paint shader, but it is the essence of it. This makes 47 nodes. It has auto enabled shader GC, and works all the way back to Poser 5. The parameter nodes Candy Color, Candy Blur, and IOR will be arranged neatly on the left side.

color = AGC(PMC(Color(.8, .03, .03), "Candy Color"))

candyBlur = PM(2, "Candy Blur")

ior = PM(1.6, "IOR")

candyColor = color ** (1 / (.1 + .9 * EdgeBlend(1, 0, 1)))

baseColor = WHITE

baseFresnel = .6 + .4 * ((1 - .18 * EdgeBlend(1, 0, 1)) ** 30.8)

reflectBase = candyColor * baseFresnel * baseColor * AGC(Reflect(0, .6, candyBlur, .1))

reflectSurface = AGC(Reflect(0, .2, 0, .1))

fresnel = TrueFresnel(ior)

output = Blend(reflectBase, reflectSurface, fresnel)

View(GC(output))

Ok, that was quite painless.

Downloaded, installed and configured matmatic. Saved your example candy paint script as a mm1.txt file and ran matmatic.

Worked first time :-)

Cool. So now I have to read the documentation carefully and see if I can write something from scratch. Doesn't seem so daunting now.

Thanks BB.

SnarlyGribbly:

RobynsVeil will be ecstatic that some one has joined her on the Mathmatics-side.

lmk

@lkendall: Yes, I had noticed that Robyn mentions it from time to time :-)

@BB: Ha! You'll wish you'd never mentioned matmatic to me :-) ... any chance the Scatter node could be updated to be compatible with the latest builds?

Latest builds? You mean there's a change in SR2? I haven't installed it yet. What's different?

Quote - Latest builds? You mean there's a change in SR2? I haven't installed it yet. What's different?

Scatter node now has a Scatter_Group input.

It means we can put the skin in one scatter group, and mouth materials in another. No more blue skin that way. Same with skin/nostrils materials.

That's easy to add. But I will have to install it and reverse engineer the internal parameter name. They don't document any of this, so each time I have to hand-build a material using a new feature, save it, open it in a text editor, and look at what got stored.

If you want to just post me an MT5 with nothing but a scatter node in there, then I would not have to install SR2 and I could get you an updated matmatic very quickly.

I'm in the middle of work at the moment.

I use a simple wacro to give me data on the nodes in a shader, including internal names of the node and its inputs:

Name: Scatter (Internal name = scatter)
Type: scatter
Location: (255, 34)
    Material = 1.0
    Use_Material_Color = 1.0
    Texture_Detail = 0.5
    scale = 1.0
    maxError = 0.20000000298
    Color = (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
    Scatter_Group = 1.0

I've attached the .mt5 anyway.

Snarlygribbly thank you for sharing the metals

SG I updated the matmatic page with 1.5.0 - it has the Scatter_Group added to Scatter and to SubsurfaceSkin. (I assumed it was there too - let me know if it isn't.)

There are a couple other new things that were waiting in the wings. See the included Revision History for details.

Thanks for that BB!  All looking good now.

The timing of my interest in Matmatic is especially bad as I'm about to go away for the weekend so won't be able to explore it for a few days. I'm trying to resist the temptation to take a netbook with me as I'm supposed to be photographing and being sociable, and I know what I'm like if I have a 'pooter with me!

Anyway, this looks like it'll be a real boon once I get my head around it, which a quick glance through the documentation suggests will be quite straightforward.

Thank you!

ps: Just a tiny thing, but the paragraph on your free site introducing v1.5 still refers to the 1.4 zip.

Thanks - I fixed the page.

Make sure you have a look at PP2012.mm1.txt - in the PP2012-Demos folder.

Just to be clear: that's an internal, beta-testing SR2, yes?

Beta is, by definition, external. But, yes, it is in beta.