Even tho I've been making Poser9/PP12 metals by setting them up the old fashined way (reflect node on reflection color, fresnel blend on reflection value, blinn on alt specular), it doesn't look quite right to me. That and the fact that I can't help remembering BB say that all reflections should be white ;). Now, obviously when I set things up thru alt diffuse and use the fresnel blend node as the base for the rest of the nodes, I have the slight confusion about what to do with the inner color on the fresnel blend node...can I link both and inner and outer colors to the same reflection node setup for the outer metal color? (see pic) or must I do it another way?

Thanks a bunch for any help...I'm really trying to understand this material room...lol.

Laurie

PS, FWIW, when I render using the setup in this image, the shader is slightly darker than the first way...tho it looks better to my eyeballs. Might just be me tho. LOL. The difference is slight at best (if indeed there is a difference at all but the color definitely changes). More images to follow....

This is the way I've typically been setting up metals..it's been bugging me that there's something just overly, I dunno, "bright" about this setup. Not that it doesn't look nice, it just looks slightly "not realistic" LOL.

Laurie

I can't help you with the node setup, but I can say that between the two I prefer the original one. :)  Might be the "Oh Shiney" thing coming into play though. LOL!  The new setup reminds me more of an antique gold.

As for the reflection color, wouldn't that be a blend of the color of the metal plus whatever colors it picks up from the surrounding surfaces, and thus your setup of using the metal color would be correct.....or am I thinking about this the wrong way around? (Probably am...usually do think backwards. ) 

Jan

Well, all I'm going by is when I look here at my gold ring, it looks a lot more like the first one :P Hehe.

Laurie

The way your fresnel_blend is set up, it is doing nothing. The fresnel_blend blends between input 1 and input 2, if you set both to the same value, then the effect is just as if the node wasn't there.

Metals do color the reflection - anything non-conductive has a white reflection, conductors apply color to reflections as far as I remember.

Alrighty...thanks stewer ;)

Laurie

Quote - Well, all I'm going by is when I look here at my gold ring, it looks a lot more like the first one :P Hehe.

Laurie

I had to compare my 40 year old wedding band and a new necklace to see the colors. LOL!  To my eyes the first one is more like an older, worn gold item and the second one more like a new gold color. ;)

In the end, I think it's very much a personal preference as far as the color and shine goes. :)

Jan

Either effect works for me, Laurie. As DreamerZ said, it comes down to personal preference. Why not include both shaders and let the user make the choice?

Well, I'm not gonna release an improperly set up shader if I know it's improperly set up. LOL.

Laurie

OOoh you hadn't let me see the cross yet Laurie, make sure there is a good antique silver in there too and my little goth heart will love you forever.  As to the node set up I can't be of much help, I tend to default to using your metals for Poser 8 as it is.  I thinnk it is cause I am lazy...

Quote - Well, I'm not gonna release an improperly set up shader if I know it's improperly set up. 

Looks to me like they both work. As far as whether either is "improperly" setup is beyond my knowlege. Is Bagginsbill about? He probably would need to see the setup screens.

Attached Link: BB Metal

It took some searching, but I found the thread where BB shows the node setup for his simple metal shader. :)

Jan

this is one of bill's.  note carefully what stewer said.

This would be how I would draft a metal shader. Not tweaked to perfection though.

I use this kind of set up.

I build my shaders using my MATHelper tool, which makes it easy to construct a variety of standard shader structures.

It also has the facility to rename nodes, copy shaders from one material zone to a selection of others (optionally retaining the existing texture maps) and drag and drop replacement of texture maps. It's quite handy.

And free :-)

All the MATHelper screens

"Well, I'm not gonna release an improperly set up shader if I know it's improperly set up. LOL."

Even if the end result is pleasing to you and everyone else? Sorry, but to me that seems taking this thing a little too far :-)

Quote - I use this kind of set up.

I build my shaders using my MATHelper tool, which makes it easy to construct a variety of standard shader structures.

It also has the facility to rename nodes, copy shaders from one material zone to a selection of others (optionally retaining the existing texture maps) and drag and drop replacement of texture maps. It's quite handy.

And free :-)

I missed this great freebee but cannot seem to access it. I can't remember if I have a login at your site or not. I tried the 'I forgot password' and it couldn't find me. So I went looking to register and can't seem to do that either. Could you help? I don't know what's up because I've downloaded EZskin from you and your metal shaders.

I missed this great freebee but cannot seem to access it. I can't remember if I have a login at your site or not. I tried the 'I forgot password' and it couldn't find me. So I went looking to register and can't seem to do that either. Could you help? I don't know what's up because I've downloaded EZskin from you and your metal shaders.

Registrations for my site are currently disabled.

However all downloads can be accessed without registering or signing in.

This particular one is simply labelled 'MATHelper' in the Freebies section, so just help yourself to it :-)

IMHO a "properly semi physical" setup for metals requires colored reflections only, plus (same colored) specular because Poser reflections don't handle direct lighting from spot/point/etc. The trick is to set the right specularity value to match the reflectivity. Metals don't have diffuse or anything alike by nature, but the reflections do introduce a mild Fresnel effect (mild - because reflection is very high already).
As a result, metals in scenes do need something to reflect, lighting included :) and Firefly needs to be set up accordingly.

On the other hand, one might like to fake the physics to speed up rendering and to simplify scene construction and lighting. After all, Firefly is a non-physics based biased renderer. Then one can throw in Diffuse, reflection maps and whatever, and one can drift away from "real metal" as far as required. 

And... one can choose to merge both worlds in order to get a shader that sort of works in all conditions. This gives about Snarlys setup. Nothing good or bad about any choice by the way, because finally we don't have to make metals, but we have to make renders which show objects that look like metal convincingly. Most people hardly can tell the difference between fake / non-physical and real / physical anyway.

I'm interested in the resulting setup.

In the end, I used the second setup above....

Thanks everyone.

Laurie

Laurie, may I make some suggestions on that 2nd setup?

1. reflection color looks okay, somewhere BB recommended (255,215,150) for red gold and (255,230,95) for yellow gold.

2. I suggest to set the specular color to the same value. Specularity is just the reflection of direct light, and metals produce colored reflections (gold: 100% red 95% orange 30% blue)

1. I suggest to improve in the fresnel. Set Inner color to 95% white because that matches gold, the outer color is 100% (full reflection due to fresnel effect). The IOR should be very high for fresnel on metals, say 40 but 10 at least. 1-4 is for liquids and glass and stuff.

2. I suggest to match the reflectivity of the reflection and the one in Blinn. Feeding the fresnel into the blinn as well seems logical then, for the reason mentioned in 2.

have fun

Too late now. Already released.

Thanks all for their suggestions.

Laurie

stewer? May I ask you why you used 20 as the IOR in the fresnel blend node in your gold shader? That's not even close to the real IOR of gold (which is 0.47). If we can't use the real IOR why do we have an IOR input? Or is it multiplied somehow?

Sorry, but this is just one of the things that makes me crazy about the material room and why I don't have a clue what's going on in it. Not like other 3D programs at all that are relatively straightforward. IOR in those IS the real IOR (Luxrender, Cycles and Kerkythea just to name a couple).

Frustration continues....

Laurie

Quote - Sorry, but this is just one of the things that makes me crazy about the material room and why I don't have a clue what's going on in it. Not like other 3D programs at all that are relatively straightforward. IOR in those IS the real IOR (Luxrender, Cycles and Kerkythea just to name a couple).

Yeah, to get good results from Firefly seems to require a whole lot more skill than many other renderers because you first have to learn its various quirks and shortcomings and then the various additional steps needed to overcome them or to 'fake' the things it just can't do.

I'm often amazed by the skill and dedication of the various material room gurus who post here, and I can't help wondering why they haven't migrated to a more capable renderer, to either halve their effort or double the quality of their results.

Quote - stewer? May I ask you why you used 20 as the IOR in the fresnel blend node in your gold shader? That's not even close to the real IOR of gold (which is 0.47). If we can't use the real IOR why do we have an IOR input? Or is it multiplied somehow?

It was pulled out of thin air. I was to lazy to find out the actual IOR and just put a number in there that didn't look too terrible.

IMHO, the fresnel effect on metals in close to negligible anyway - at least not nearly as prominent as it is on non-conductive surfaces.

hi all,

from optics class: R = { (N-1)/(N+1) }^2 for reflection coeff R and refraction coeff N, also known as the IOR.

the inverse: N = [1+sqrt(R)] / [1-sqrt(R)]

for water, N=1,33 resulting in R = (0,33/2,33)^2 = 0,02 - it hardly reflects at all.
for glass, N=1,50 resulting in R= (0,5/2,5)^2 = 0,04 - twice as reflective

for gold, say R = 0,90 resulting in N = (1+0,95)/(1-0,95) = 39.
for silver, say R=0,95 resulting in N=79
for pewter say R=0,70 resulting in N=12

of course one can take the complex arithmatic route to be exact but I guess Poser Fresnel is not supporting that.

Also note: considering reflections on a ball the R gives the reflection in the middle area while fresnel takes it to 100% at the edges. For R=2% (water) this is far more noticeable than for R=95% (silver) already.

Laurie,

why is the spec set to light blue? I can see that it's value is set to 0 so it is not "on" in the scene.

I see this blue tint on just about every vender product that I have bought in the last couple of years and every one of them interfere's with lighting the fiugure or prop. Is it just my system? I understand that it might have something to do with gamma but it looks wrong if gamma is on and set to 2.2 (default).

I'm also a little sceptical of these crazy 100+ shader node mats. I have tested some of the metal shaders that Ive got off the web against ones with plain old reflect nodes and can't tell the difference between renders. just a thought...now Ill put on my flame-proof suit.

 

just of give my 2ct, Laurie might have her own reasons (and will kick in, I'm sure).

the pale cyan I know is present in mainly the early V4 skins, in Diffuse that is. It takes out a bit of red, which is re-added in via the ambient and alt_diffuse channels. As a result it fakes a subsurface scattering on caucasian skin in Poser renders, without the rendertime costs (and in times SSS was not around at all).

Due to the way gamma correction works in PoserPro2010/12/... (and from May 21 on, in P10 as well :-) ) this fake effects turns into the well known unhealthy long term smoking vampire skin as the cyannic effect is enhanced.

More on this in my tutorial on Gamma and Corrections http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl/?p=317

And of course you're right, most people don't have a good clue how a metal really looks like. But some people do. On the other hand, a lot of people will get some mental clue when it's off even when they can't tell why. In my opinion, making (alt) specular the same color as reflectuon is clue in metal as it colors the reflection, and Poser specular is just the reflection of the direct lights as Poser reflection is the reflection of all surfaces, lit in a direct or indirect way. Adding both up completes the scene.

Quote - Laurie,

why is the spec set to light blue? I can see that it's value is set to 0 so it is not "on" in the scene.

I see this blue tint on just about every vender product that I have bought in the last couple of years and every one of them interfere's with lighting the fiugure or prop. Is it just my system? I understand that it might have something to do with gamma but it looks wrong if gamma is on and set to 2.2 (default).

I'm also a little sceptical of these crazy 100+ shader node mats. I have tested some of the metal shaders that Ive got off the web against ones with plain old reflect nodes and can't tell the difference between renders. just a thought...now Ill put on my flame-proof suit.

 

It's there because I had it set up another way, changed it, and neglected to change the color back to white. No other reason. LOL.

Oh, and stewer? I know why you set the IOR so high with the inner color on the fresnel as black ;). When I left the actual IOR in the fresnel nose, I got a tiny white dot in the middle of a black shader. LOL.

Still doesn't make sense that you can't use actual IORs tho. Just makes for a whole lot of confusion.

Laurie

Quote - I'm also a little sceptical of these crazy 100+ shader node mats. I have tested some of the metal shaders that Ive got off the web against ones with plain old reflect nodes and can't tell the difference between renders. just a thought...now Ill put on my flame-proof suit.

I absolutely adhere to this sentence. IMHO there is NOT any reason for infinite nodes... when many times some of them just cancel or invalide the others.

For getting realistic metals lately I have started to use an AO node to limit where the reflections go and where they should be ignored. Some kind of patina, or age... Laurie call me to home for more details if you like ;)

Fabi

> Quote - I absolutely adhere to this sentence. IMHO there is NOT any reason for infinite nodes... when many times some of them just cancel or invalide the others. > > For getting realistic metals lately I have started to use an AO node to limit where the reflections go and where they should be ignored. Some kind of patina, or age... Laurie call me to home for more details if you like ;) > > Fabi

Oh Fabi if that's permission to pick your brains for tips and information I may just take you up on that :P LOL

To be honest, I tried the AO node, but don't really know what to do with the settings ;). Was trying to bring that gold over the SSS shader out of the backround to make it pop. Alas, I popped instead ;).

Laurie

You just call me here tomorrow or look for me on Skype ;)