glossy material problem

Support Materials and Textures
1

Edit: Nevermind, I figured it out a few seconds after posting this, I just needed to mess with some of the other values a bit more, as I was previously only messing with mainly the glossy value and the positioning of the nodes.

I’m not sure where else to ask this, so, here goes. I was trying to make a lightsaber in Blender as my own first project without using any tutorials at all, and it’s…mostly worked out. The problem is that I needed to create a mask for it, because certain parts of it are glossy, while others are far more diffused. When I added in the mask and attached the glossy material, it for some reason seems to also control the colour of part of the model.

Specifically a part of the model that’s supposed to be black, when I add in the mask and the glossy material the glossy material will suddenly make that black area a dark grey and I can’t seem to return it to black without disconnecting the glossy and mask.

Here’s a view of the model as it is in render view:

lightsaberrenderview.png1366×665 170 KB

And here’s my current node set up:

lightsabernodeeditor.png1366×667 148 KB

2

You do know that you connected it to the color and not the glossy mix, right?

3

Yes I do. It doesn’t seem to work the way it should if I use the other connections, I used the colour because it seemed to be the only connection that got me in the ballpark of the effect I was looking for.

4

The reason why it didn’t appear as completely black is because the surface was reflecting the background (Cycles does real specularity as opposed to the faked effect that BI uses).

Also, you shouldn’t have anything that is perfectly black if you’re aiming for realism(unless the lightsaber has parts made of that new ‘Vanta-black’ material that was recently developed).

5

Aha, I see. I’m not sure exactly how to fix that other then what I did that seems to have fixed it, but anyway lol

Also I know, but the lightsaber I was trying to model is essentially Darth Vader’s from the movie Return of the Jedi. In all of the pictures I found of it, the lightsaber seems to vary what’s black and what’s silver, but it’s always some variation of the two, and as for the black areas of it I can never tell, including the glossy areas, what colour it could possibly be other then black. I suppose in the end it’s probably just a very dark blue, but I can’t say for sure.