Creating metalness map

Hi,

Can anyone tell me (or point me to info) on how to create a metalness map, within cycles?

Many thanks

Cycles baking was implemented way before the principled shader so there’s no simple way to automatically bake out albedo or metalness info based on the shader.

Go bother the devs till they fix it :wink:

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basics is white is shiny and black is not; greys are middle ground. simple enough.

way we do:
edit mode->select mesh faces that should be metal
vertex paint->enable face selection masking
pick solid white color->shift+k to flood fill.
ctrl+i to invert selection->pick solid black color->shift+k to flood fill.
node editor->add->input->vertex colors->plug it to metalness
you can play around with other nodes to squeeze more looks out of it.

either that or painting/baking the mask to a texture.

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Ah! I feared that might be the case. Given that, what would be the easiest way to create a metalness map for an object? I’ve modelled a old style stove kettle that is 99.5% metallic, aside from some very small rust/dirt areas - so would this make creating a metalness map easier - given they are monochrome?

Thanks for your reply

Si

Great! Thanks for that Liebranca…you seem to have answered my previous post!

Thanks a lot

Create a white texture, and paint the parts that are not metal black.
I wouldn’t use vertex colors since the resolution is tied to the amount of vertex you have.

see this video for map and PBR

happy cl

Any mask you already have is the metalness map (you can feed it into an emission shader and bake that). Generally speaking, an material is either metal or dielectric (ignoring rarely used semi conducting materials), and any non 0 or 1 values should be for anti aliasing/bleeding, rather than mixing in i.e. carbon (for carbon steel) - those amounts are completely ignorable and not what makes the material believable.

For space, you could make it grayscale single image, or make it a channel in combination with other grayscale images (i.e. AO=Red, roughness=Green, metalness=Blue).

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