Render for metallic material using vray maya.

Grant Warwick - Lesson 4a
*For this post all examples would be referenced to the green dirty, rusty metal shown in lesson 4a of grant warwick*

Amazing lesson that I've learnt from this guy. Taught me how to reconstruct a material starting from the larger details like diffuse and reflection falloff. although the reflection falloff is only in 3ds Max, but there're other ways to achieve it in Maya too.

FALLOFF in maya - http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-9777.html
* similar to x-ray effect in maya. need to check it out too.

Falloff map for reflection is used to control how the specular/highlight appear in our eyes at different glancing angle. Basically, it's the falloff for the reflectivity on the material.
** need to study more about different glancing material at different angle.

For example metal which normally has different layers of specularity, layers of metal material (coat) will be added to each other using vray blend material of course, with difference specularity falloff (reflection falloff)


BLINN & PHONG - plastics or chrome?
WARD - metallic items?

Vray 3.3 has this new shader called GGX, which handles the specularity of the metal much more accurately.


Anyway, after getting down larger details like diffuse and reflection falloff, will then be able to proceed on to bump maps, then eg. rust and dust... Rust and base metal are totally different materials so when attempting to create rust effect, please blend them together using vrayblendmtl instead of trying to combine them together inside the base metal material.

simple mindmap to show workflow

using procedural textures like solid fractal and layered textures help to make the pattern more irregular and randomized.
EG. under solid fractal texture's colour 1&2. able to input more procedural texture too. texture in texture?