So… this is strange.
My object is selected and the material preview shows it should be a chrome (glossy BSDF + diffuse BSDF mix shader).
But Cycles refuses to render anything even remotely resembling chrome and just leaves me with this default-esque paper look.
I resolved it.
Still don’t know what caused it. It could be a bug.
I believe something got lost in switching render engines.
When I switched back to Blender I noticed the material nodes were showing as not linked.
After linking and unlinking back and forth with both render engines I was able to get the node materials working.
no, you had multiple materials on top of the one you want to show…
and some times, you need to check if a material is properly assigned… i use to run into that problem alot
Thanks! From now on I’ll be careful of materials on top of the one I want to use.
Those were generated from the SVG file I imported and it didn’t occur to me to delete them.
I also was struggling with linking the material to the object vs linking it to the object data.
I would try to assign material to a portion of the mesh and it would change the material for the entire object.
This is because I was doing it the old way I had learned back in the 4.9 days and before Cycles.
After some studying of the Blender Wiki I realized my mistake and how to use this drop-down Object/Data button correctly.
Basically I had problems with
node linkage varying between different render engines
having multiple materials stacked (Thanks for pointing that out!)
assigning to Object when I wanted to assign to Data and vice versa
I got it sorted out now.