cycles gold material test

Working on a realistic un-polished gold material. I think I need to tweak some of the materials in terms of contributions to the displacement, but here is what I have so far. 2nd with the normal material, 1st with the displacement textures scaled up 10x. Nodes are nice that you can use one value to control a lot of other values.

http://i.imgur.com/oNgTi.png

http://i.imgur.com/7yEpq.png

Hey good job! I love cycles dont you?

Hi,
Beautifull gold, isn’t it!
Is it possible to share your setup, please? I am very interessed…
Thanks a lot for your reply in advance.
Spirou4D

Sure, I intend to change it around a little more, then once I think it’s finished I will post the blend.

Can we see your nodes?

Hey, sorry, yeah here it is. It’s quite inefficient and renders very slowly, but I think it gives a nice, solid feel to the surface.
Cycles Unpolished Gold Material.blend (765 KB)

Very nice material here !!
Here’s my attempt using the same setup as your’s:

I added fresnel to the glossy material so that it reflects more on the edges of the sphere.
My displacement setup is simpler than yours so the render time is nearly reduced by half (600 pass gave ~1h52m for yours versus 1h09m on mine on my poor dual core). However the displacement probably doesn’t look as good as yours and needs tweaking…
Here’s my node setup:


1 Like

cool, but shouldn’t the fresnel amount affect a blending factor with a diffuse material, (or something), not roughness? Also, it’s crazy that how many displacement nodes one uses should affect render time by that much. Obviously that bit needs optimization.

I originally tried to mix glossy with diffuse using fresnel as factor indeed, but I wasn’t too pleased with the result. I set it for roughness so that I can control the way reflections get clearer the more faces are tangent to the camera view and rougher the other way round. But I’ll have to retry mixing diffuse with glossy some day…
Yes displacement is really time consuming for renders ! To get a quick idea of the look of it I found that “seeing” it though an emission node was quite efficient. But I hope it gets optimized !

^^ ah, that is a good trick. I was doing diffuse materials, but emission would be even faster.

I have been looking for that effect, but I didn’t find it.

I think a gold shader’s look is at least 50% dependent on surroundings and lighting. Thanks for the comments though!

What do you mean exactly ? Is it that the glossy should be mixed with a diffuse at a .5 factor for the gold shader ?

@elbrujodelatribu Thanks ^^

A quick example about the ‘depends on surroundings’ thing - http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com.au/2007/10/making-better-metal-with-miamaterial.html

Gold being so reflective means it is more interesting to look at when it is reflecting a more interesting environment. Generally speaking.

^^ yes, exactly. The environment that you render the gold object in matters more than how well you set up the material.