Quote - > Quote - > Quote - > Quote - > Quote - I would have but Paolo removed the reflection channel in the custom metals which took away the ability to achieve the subtle differences in the color tones of the metals..     Paolo, please add that back into the custom metals..... Please! Please! Please!

Sorry, can't do. The new metal2 material from Lux works as exposed by Reality. The old shinymetal material has been deprecated and will be on its way out at some point.

So how do we set it up to take advantage of that?

Badger the boy's/girls at Lux into adding it back in....... "J" you can step in here and let us know whats up with that..... Hint Hint

 

What on earth do you need shinymetal back for? Shinymetal sucks, it's a perfect reflector with a varnish coat on it.

 

Internally, the metal2 shader has 3 inputs: fresnel, uroughness, and vroughness. Fresnel is the one that determines what the metal's IOR curve looks like, which determines its appearance. You can use the fresnelname and fresnelcolor textures to feed datasets to it for either measured/preset data (fresnelname) or to make the metal appear a desired color (fresnelcolor). You can also use some other textures to define the surface with the sellmier equation and such, but its not terribly useful.

The other part, uroughness and vroughness, is how dull or shiny the material is. Reality should have some kind of roughness/shinyness/polish/whatever input that controls these (i have no idea if Paolo added anisotropic roughness support, but its there internally).

So the thing you are feeding here is the fresnel input, which you can certainly feed image textures into. Behind the scenes, the node chain would go: color imagemap > frenselcolor (kr input) > metal2 (fresnel input). Reality would set this up for you if you ask it to texture the surface color.

The main reason you'd want to do that though is for dyed metals, ex, anodized aluminum. Or sci-fi alloys, or real-world metals you lack an Nk file for. For clean metal, you'd want to leave it untextured and let the reflections do their thing. For dirty metal, you'd want to either texture the roughness or mix the metal2 material with something else (ex, matte or a dull glossy) to simulate the dirty parts.

 

 

Did that help?

All I know is that with the old system of having the 2 color input channels I was able to create the subtle differences of lets say 10kt, 14kt and 24kt gold. This perhaps due to my lack of understanding the new system, I have been unable to accomplish.

 

The metals system in place now has many uses for certain metal types but for "shiny" polished metals I liked the old system better.

 

I have been asked several times to recreate those metal presets and have not been able to do so.

 

I believe it would be possible if the second color channel was added back in.

But polished metal is just that, a perfect reflective surface with a varnish coat. Maybe it's the varnish coat I'm missing. LOL