Specular Highlight - A&D Material

[kevjon]

This one has got me beat and maybe someone here knows.

The cylinder is used for testing textures & materials.

I have applied a standard glossy A&D template material to this uv mapped cylinder. In the diffuse color slot I've put my very basic color texture. In the bump slot I've put my grayscale bump map. All good so far.

Problem I have is that I want to make the specular highlight the same across all the colors. At the moment it doesn't show across the red and green. I also want to break up the specular highlight to create a rough looking material. I've tried putting grayscale textures into the reflection slot but that has no effect on the specular highlight and seems to only control how much the different colors reflect.

Anybody have any ideas on how the specular is controlled in the Arch and Design Materials ?

PS
I know I can use Max's standard and raytrace materials to solve this but I have problems with those materials as the MR renderer sometimes creates black, white or colored blotches in my renders when using those materials and there is also no way to blur the reflections when using Raytrace materials and the Mental Ray renderer.

[moid]

I don't know how to do what you want in the Arch Design material but you could always use a standard material and put a falloff map (fresnel) in the reflection slot, then add a Lume Metal shader to the white slot of the falloff - that will give you blurred reflections if you adjust the settings, and to get the specular looking right, make sure your reflection IOR is high enough and place a white self illuminated plane opposite the cylinder and set it to only appear in reflections. That way it will reflect into the surface of the cylinder and you can easily adjust its appearance by moving or scaling the plane so the 'specular' looks correct. If you need a soft 'specular' put a gradient ramp on the plane that's set to box so that the plane fades off at the edges.

[kevjon]

I am currently looking at using A&D materials in my 3D aviation art, so reason for this thread.

Thanks Moid. Thats great there is a way to blur reflections when using raytrace materials & Mental Ray.....I didn't know that you could. It will come in most useful in future work. The trick to highlighting speculars with a nearby self illuminated plane I'll try out. Thanks !

For anybody else who might be interested in this topic Jeff Patton and MasterZap responded in a thread on another forum

by Jeff Patton
A. A&D material with highlights & FG only mode enabled.
B. Standard material with fake specular highlights.
C. A&D material with true glossy reflections.

Darker colors absorb more light than lighter colors therefore the white color will "over-burn" way before the dark colors, washing out the reflections/specular effect.

File if needed: http://jeffpatton.net/Temp/specular.zip

by MasterZap
Also, guys, please note, the REALLY COOL effects you get when you put your maps into the *glossiness*. For your "aviation art", that's the place for it, I'd say. You'll get fantastic realistic speculars this way, since you are modulating the *glossiness* across the surface, it's just like in real life where smudges, fingerprints, oilsplats, dirt, etc. modulate the glossiness of a real surface.

And since the A&D specular is energy conserving, the more "spread out" ones will have less of a peak, so where you in "oldschool" materials tended to map your specular *level*, it is much better to map the *glossiness* in A&D.

I think you'll find it dazzlingly realistic looking, especially in animations.

[nisus]

And since the A&D specular is energy conserving, the more "spread out" ones will have less of a peak, so where you in "oldschool" materials tended to map your specular *level*, it is much better to map the *glossiness* in A&D.


Very Very Good ,-)

nisus

[Shimrod]

+1, good idea to prefer the glossiness slot for mapping, I'll try it . :)