I'm making a sword in Blender. But it's Poser I'm concerned with. I want to make a decent looking steel sword mat file. Any suggestions on how to set that up?

What sort of sword? Pattern welded, damascene, old and reliable... all have very different surface qualities. A sword is not a sword. Rapiers are different to broad swords which are different to longswords which are different to katanas and scimitars...

Depends what type of steel you are envisioning.  You can use Snarly's EZMetal or peruse this forum link from RDNA:

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?33166-Raytraced-reflections-on-a-sword-blade&highlight=steel

What sort of sword? Pattern welded, damascene, old and reliable... all have very different surface qualities. A sword is not a sword. Rapiers are different to broad swords which are different to longswords which are different to katanas and scimitars...

I'm talking a longsword. If it'll help, I'll see if I can render a pic of the blade in question.

Here's a quick render of the sword. I want to give the blade a "brushed steel" kind of look. Shiny, metalic, but not mirror refelective. I think the word is "Anisotropic".

I'd go with Snarly's as well. Obviously very fine brushed effects if that's the look you want (never see that in real swords, but NM). One thing you might do is create a separate mat zone for the edges so they can have different qualities (either more reflective, or deeper brush marks to suggest a coarse stone used for sharpening... also helps to have the edges 'glint' if they have a different reflect value).

Iron is blue grey. Swords are usually a mix of iron and steel. Steel is more 'silvery'... shift the iron colour more towards white. Made reflective, your blade is currently looking OK for steel, or add a touch of blue.

Well, I have to hit the sack, but I'll run down Snarly's EZ metal in the morning and peruse the thread Hborre pointed to. Thanks guys. I'll post results.

Iron is blue grey. Swords are usually a mix of iron and steel. Steel is more 'silvery'... shift the iron colour more towards white. Made reflective, your blade is currently looking OK for steel, or add a touch of blue.

Steel IS iron (iron mixed with a pinch of carbon), so I doubt anyone could tell the difference between iron and steel just by looking at it. Swords are steel, because iron, on its own, can't be heat- hardened to hold an edge. Remember that any metal using any fancy shader in any renderer is going to look shite unless you give it a nice environment to reflect. And it's going to look different in a different environment.

And this text input box is STILL BROKEN!!!!!

While pure iron is silver coloured, most folks have never seen pure iron.  Cast iron is iron containing a lot of carbon (2-4%) and silicon, so it is grey.  Back before Bessemer Converters, steel was made at the forge by literally hammering the carbon and silicon from the hot iron...

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Hmm.  Before the Bessemer process, steel was made by the crucible method, which is a very time consuming process, that of heating to a molten state, back in the early days, meaning weeks.  Iron hammered is not really steel, but wrought iron.  Pure iron is a rather crap material, it may be hard, difficult to achieve, and it's primary quality is brittle.

Surface appearance for Iron or steel can be difficult to discern, there are so many different types or alloys that steel can be made with almost any properties you want.  Trying to discern between one and another on appearance, forget it.  Hammered steels will have a different appearance depending on what process is used, however a sword is usually hammered thin, doubled over, hammered to weld the two, repeat the process until you have the required number of laminations to give the desired strength.  This will give the different patterns.  The laminating process also welds the laminations together, in effect,many layers to give it strength and some flexibility.  Where these layers have been worked or polished will show in the surface giving the visible patterns.

As far as the patterns, there will be no such thing as two with identical patterns, or even similar, it's the result of the smith doing the work. Modern steel or iron, there is no guesswork, the appearance of the finished metal will depend more on the desired qualities of the material and the methods used.  I have made for my own use, cast iron flats, with a ground finish that until it is exposed to moisture will rival the finish achieved with 4140 HT, which is a prehardened chrome-moly steel.  I have also ground and polished 1018 and 1020 steels, which will give an appearance closer to gray iron than a steel. 

I would say, Earl, find something that pleases your eye and use that.  Nobody can confront you with "That doesn't look authentic", because there are so many variations, the task would be to prove it isn't authentic. 44 years of metalworking, I do have some idea what different steels, irons and alloys look like, ancient or modern.

Doric.

The "I" in Doric is Silent.

 

I suppose I could just take myself down to the history museum and see what old swords look like. Gives me an opportunity to check out the museum anyway. Haven't been there since I was in grade school.

There are excellent examples in the Higgins Collection; images of some of the collection are here...

http://vqs61.v3.pair.com:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asimages/3063

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Steel is one of the most difficult colors.

The metal, the exposure to surroundings, hardened, hammered, grinded, poloshed, rusty.

Poser 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, P8 and PPro2010, P9 and PP2012, P10 and PP2014 Game Dev
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There are cheap swords and there are swords of unbelievably high quality. The US ended up giving back a number of surrendered Japanese swords after WWII. Turns out they were historic pieces hundreds of years old. Only an incompetent swordsman lets his sword get rusty.

Tja, you can Always Google..

"RGB for Steel" 

Poser 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, P8 and PPro2010, P9 and PP2012, P10 and PP2014 Game Dev
"Do not drive faster then your angel can fly"!

There are cheap swords and there are swords of unbelievably high quality. The US ended up giving back a number of surrendered Japanese swords after WWII. Turns out they were historic pieces hundreds of years old. Only an incompetent swordsman lets his sword get rusty.

Or a dead one

Free stuff @ https://poser.cobrablade.net/

Here's a quick render of the sword. I want to give the blade a "brushed steel" kind of look. Shiny, metalic, but not mirror refelective. I think the word is "Anisotropic".

The problem with this render is no environment. You'll have a hard time getting a convincing looking reflective metal without an environment -- either a map on the material itself, or raytracing with a world to reflect. This is one of those occasions when HDRI environments and raytracing really shine. What metals "look like" is a function of the environment around them. If you create a synthetic 3D environment with no lights and nothing to reflect, they'll look like nothing much.

one of the best pieces of advice is to pay attention to the blade, in your modeller get in real close to the edge and add a few extra edge loops to make the edge a little bit rounded, it is this that will catch specular highlights and look a hell of a lot better, also pay attention to the inner part of the sword the fuller, a LOT of models out there are very basic and dont add edge loops to this part, making it look unrealistic, again this adds the extra specular highlights,as for a material itself, my own real swords (arming sword and hand-and-a-half sword) are at a mirror finish its only the odd scratch and tiny rust bumps and dents from swords hitting it that provide any texture apart from a mirror - even when i see actual photos of my swords the mirror reflections on them look a bit strange lol so maybe a bit of artistic licence is  needed - a good looking sword and a realistic sword can be two different things :-)

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a point on brushed steel, i have splinted leg armour which is steel that ive wirebrushed with a drill :-)  to look at this texture with a modellers eye it is soo boring because from more than a foot away its just a dull flat mid grey, the bump map needed would be only visible from about an inch away!  i brushed the metal coz im too lazy too keep polishing it lol a drill takes 5 minutes yay

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I just downloaded Snarly's EZMetals. Again, I'll have to wait till i get home from work to try it out, but I did check out the Gallery. I didn't see exactly what I'm looking for, but Iron seemed to come the closest.  The brushed steel just looked a little too mirror-y for my taste. Would be nice to see a combination of the iron and steel look. Don't know if that would work, and don't know how i could do it though.

In RDNA's freebies, there are some really old material files that produce some pretty nice metal shaders. I don't even know if they host those files, still. But, if they do, they're not half bad and one could make some minor adjustments to them in order to get the effect one wanted in pretty short order.

Assuming I can be bothered to keep polling for responses (getting an ebot is just about impossible now), show us an example of what you want. I enjoy specific material puzzles.

Also, perilous7 makes a really important point. I have downloaded sword models endlessly and they almost all suck. Either they are woefully lacking in polygons so highlights don't catch where they should, or they have endless piles of inconsistent normals and twisted normals resulting in a confused surface full of illogical highlights. Since this material is all highlights, that's kind of annoying.

Trying to keep things simple, I made a very simple shader I intended to show you as a starting point. Then Poser crashed and I got pissed off but I'm willing to try again. Not sure exactly what to make so I won't bother posting endless variations that aren't what you want. There are endless details you can put in - this shader has no detail at all - just smooth, homogeneous metal.

Again - random few ebots come to me from this site, so my awareness of responses may be sporadic.

This sword is also flawed but it's the least flawed of many I tried yesterday.

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is that an invite to sell my line of sword objects BB lol 

the materials that BB has on those sword objects are pretty much how my swords look in normal outdoor daylight settings - one more thing i will say, if you are using swords in poser make sure the smoothing on the flat edges are sorted and it does my head in as it completely ruins all the edges due to the phong shading - edge breaks needed if im correct?

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Now you've got me paranoid about how many polygons my sword has, BB.  :)

Here's a (finish or smoothness or roughness or blur) catalog of sorts. It's a simple metallic shader built with:

Color White, Diffuse 0 (!!), Reflectivity .8, IOR 4

Blur (aka Reflection softness) varies left (0) to middle (1) to right (4)

Every version has different settings on the Blinn node so that the reaction to a Poser light matches the reflections of small bright objects in the scene.

The formulas for all possible variations are not important or helpful if there is one specific shader you want to create. Or I could give you the formulas and you can make an infinite number of variations.

If you think this metal is too "black" I can raise it up - it is "blacker" than the swords I posted earlier.

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I lean towards the last three on the right. And honestly, I can't tell much difference between the third and second from the right.

I have to admit though that the thought of a Black Sword intrigues me. But yes, I'd like the formulas please.

(Note: I number these 0 through 10, left to right - there are 11 total)

You can't tell much difference? Did you look at the flat cells behind the pawns carefully? Curved surfaces fool you - your sword is only slightly curved so the flat cells tell a very important story.

Look in cell #8 - you can still tell that there is a pawn reflected in it. Whereas #10 is completely obliterated - if you saw that by itself you'd barely know what it's reflecting.

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Another catalog: Reflectivity=.9 IOR=6

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I'm glad you pointed that out, BB. I can see the difference a little better there.

Ughhhh - I see that my Blinn formula is off - I've been tweaking it for about two years but I have not been doing a lot of super blurry reflections lately. They take so long to test. Time to adjust the formulas again.

Anyway - another catalog - not quite right formulas, though.

This with Reflectivity=.95 and IOR=10

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So after numerous Poser crashes and other mishaps, here's something really simple to use.

This is a nice middle-ground on the mirror vs. satin finish. It is the simplest possible metal shader I could make so as to minimize confusing options, while still providing a good result.

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Here is are a couple renders - one indoors, one outdoors.

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For a more polished/mirrored look, change two numbers: Reflect softness and Blinn eccentricity.

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For a "black" sword, change two numbers: Reflection_Value and Index_of_Refraction

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Thanks, BB. I'll play around with it as soon as I get home. I did go back into Blender though and increased the number of polygons in the sword. I'll render the results then.

For a ridiculous, mythical "white" sword (no real metal is this bright), raise all the numbers like this:

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If you want to incorporate some impurity - you can plug things in to modulate the Reflection softness, the Blinn eccentricity, or the Fresnel_Blend outer color (which basically controls maximum reflection level).

Here I used a Granite node to make some subtle spots. The blade on the right in the render has the Granite.

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We can get a sprinkle of tiny divots by adding a couple more nodes.

(Note my display units are inches - that bump value is -.001 inch - make sure you pay attention to your units)

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Bagginsbill

Thanks for your time with this.

The idea of that Black Sword has kind of grown on me. But I'm thinking of having some writing etched into the blade.  I'm wondering if it would even show up on a black sword.

Would be a cool effect if I  could get the writing to glow.

Find some Elvish writing. (I had to stretch the crap out of the sample I found so it matched this sword's UV layout)

Shove the metal nodes into an HSV and then mix with a Blender, controlled by the writing.

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Looks like this

Day vs. Night

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Bagginsbill

Thanks for your time with this.

You're welcome! Show me some swords!

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Shoot! I want to model a sword just to use this.

Nice work, BB! 

If I had a nickle for ever time a woman told me to get lost, I could buy Manhattan.

My rendering skills are sorely lacking. All that work BB did and I STILL can't make it look right. And worse, I KNOW it has to do with the environment I put the sword in.

Now you've got me paranoid about how many polygons my sword has, BB.  :)

what is more important is HOW  you have them arranged on the model, any sort of twisting of the poly faces look awful when a reflective metallic material is applied, so long as you add enough polys to avoid this, most of the time you can skimp a little in other places, ive seen some cracking models that hardly seem to have many polys at all, just skill and experience i suppose, like most things in life.

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The idea of that Black Sword has kind of grown on me. But I'm thinking of having some writing etched into the blade.  I'm wondering if it would even show up on a black sword.

Would be a cool effect if I  could get the writing to glow.

one of my fellow knights has a sword with a blacked metal hilt, it looks really nice, i dont think the blade is blackened as it is a heat treatment that can alter the elasticity of the steel, plus every time you used it it would come off lol

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Shoot! I want to model a sword just to use this.

Nice work, BB! 

do it! a sword creating challenge is always good! :-)

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My rendering skills are sorely lacking. All that work BB did and I STILL can't make it look right. And worse, I KNOW it has to do with the environment I put the sword in.

when i get home ill try and post some pics ive got from outdoors so you can get a handle on the reflections, i think sometimes with environments you just gotta play until it pleases you as realism doesnt always look that good (as i will show you lol)

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I don't know anything about real metals or real swords, but I found dozens of black blades in Google.

Here's a video of one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_L7N-7Z8-M#t=40

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Now you've got me paranoid about how many polygons my sword has, BB.  :)

what is more important is HOW  you have them arranged on the model, any sort of twisting of the poly faces look awful when a reflective metallic material is applied, so long as you add enough polys to avoid this, most of the time you can skimp a little in other places, ive seen some cracking models that hardly seem to have many polys at all, just skill and experience i suppose, like most things in life.

Yeeeaah, I, uh, I think I went a little crazy.

lol id say so but in a wrong way! on the flat part of the blade you can get away with relatively few polys its just getting them to line up properly to the edge part that could be tricky especially as it tapers to a point. there are some good tutorials online about modelling for subdiviison surfaces to make the flow of polys consistent, they are applicable to all 3d packages and come in as best practice for poly modelling in general, i suggest you have a look as if you plan on detailing lots of objects like that your system will start to crawl as your scene builds up - if you are just rendering single object then it doesnt matter so much.

ill try and have a look and see if i can dig up some examples for you

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i have to say BB the pics you just posted with the divots in looked even more realistic :-) although may need to be small tiny clumps in areas and then none at all, that seems to be what happens with my stuff, but im sure its 20 seconds with a noise node and its sorted :-)

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My rendering skills are sorely lacking. All that work BB did and I STILL can't make it look right. And worse, I KNOW it has to do with the environment I put the sword in.

Without seeing anything from your Poser setups or renders, I can't give specific advice. Here are some tips, though:

Use good HDR images with an environment sphere. By good, I mean ones that actually have high dynamic range. I posted a comprehensive series about this topic - worth a read. --http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2877297&page_number=3Here's a great source of free, high resolution, high dynamic range images: http://www.hdri-hub.com/free-samples

Getting light levels and "exposure" right is often a matter of trial and error. Get it wrong and you may find shaders don't behave as you expect. All my (post 2010) modern shaders are as physically accurate as I can make them so if they look wrong, you probably have the environmental lighting off. I use my light meter, even when I think I know what I'm doing. If you're even slightly not clear on what's happening, get and use my light meter.

Use gamma correction and use it correctly. 

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hope your gonna write that book BB ?? ...before I'm too old to read it  lol

 

everyone always wants swords ........ why not a nice iron gate or a shiny ploughshare now and then even a weather vane would be fun once in a while  

Bagginsbill Wrote:
"I don't know anything about real metals or real swords, but I found dozens of black blades in Google."

Those black blades do look cool, the finish is sometimes called "Manganese" or "BlackOxide", I was looking into it a few years ago because I wanted to know how to "black" some parts I was planning to cut with my CNC machine.

It's quite neat really, it can even be done at home, here's a guy who "Blacked" his own knife if anyone is curious:

Thank you BagginsBill. Some very handy things there.

@EClark: If I get a sword modeled, can I post it here?

If I had a nickle for ever time a woman told me to get lost, I could buy Manhattan.

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@EClark: If I get a sword modeled, can I post it here?

Dude, knock yourself out.

My rendering skills are sorely lacking. All that work BB did and I STILL can't make it look right. And worse, I KNOW it has to do with the environment I put the sword in.

Don't let it get you down.  I'm having the same challenge which is more from me trying to just render the sword without an environment.  It's helping me to have a better understanding of the settings and how to make necessary adjustments.  I'm trying to use these settings for these weapons http://www.daz3d.com/classic-weapons-of-the-east-part-1-china

I'm really curious to know which sword models BB used in his various test renders?

It's a turbosquid freebie.

http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/knight-sword-max-free/597028

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Thanks BB! :D

There is some nice stuff on that site, and I was unaware of its existence. Excellent!