I need a wet-look effect

Artistic Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m modelling a matt-black plastic cylindrical object (it’s a rain gauge, actually) which is outdoors. Part-way through my animation there is a rain shower, and I would like the plastic to look wet. I tried turning on ray-tracing, but that makes the object pick up a lot of blue from the world colour, which is not what I want. Can I somehow make my object ignore the world colour (but I still want a blue sky)?

Or am I going about this wrong? Should I be using reflectivity and/or specularity (I fiddled with them a bit, but didn’t get good results)?

I don’t need anything hi-fidelity here, just a visible difference between dry matt-black plastic and wet black plastic.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

2

Well. You could composite the background (check compositing nodes). This would allow you to use any world colour you want.

A photo or two about the effect you are looking for would help in diagnosing the issue further. (What does wet black plastic look like?)

3

You can use animated materials, and animate the specularity and hardness to increase. that will give it a wet look.

4

Compositing the background - that’s a good idea. I shall try that.

Here’s a frame from the “dry” sequence. (It’s the guy on the left that I’m interested in.) I don’t have a photo of the effect I want, but I would like it to look shinier, without reflecting anything clearly.

I did have a liitle play with animating the materials, but it didn’t seem to make a very noticeable difference. I have ref 0.8, spec 0.5, hard 50 (standard shaders), and I tried increasing them but the result didn’t look very wet.

Attachments

0101.jpg800×600 53.2 KB

5

It turned out to be easy in the end: I just need to increase the hardness a lot more.

Thanks, both, for your help.