Jan 28
material recipe: alucobond
A couple of people have asked me about creating a material to simulate an alucobond building facade. I won’t pretend to know an exact setting for this type of material. However, I think I can give some info that will get you going in the right direction. If nothing else, maybe it will make for a decent starting point. Read on for the details.
As someone that isn’t terribly familiar with this material the first thing I did was Google some reference images. I found several different looks to this material. Some more reflective, some less reflective…some were more glossy than others, etc. Example 01, Example 02, Example 03, Example 04
That being said overall it looks like a fairly basic glossy aluminum material (IMHO). But of course I may be oversimplifying the material since I don’t have any in front of me at the moment.
To begin, the first thing to consider here is the scene environment. As with any reflective material it will only look as good as what you give it to reflect. So I setup the test scene with a nice early am/late pm panoramic HDR image.
From there I started on the alucobond material. I used an A&D material and set it up in a basic glossy metal configuration like this:
I fired off a render with this setup and here’s that result:
It seems to look alright. Perhaps a bit too new or shiny, but then again some of the reference image were more reflective and less glossy than others. So this may work for some types. Another thing I noticed about the alucobond material is that some of it appeared to have a clear coat type layer. If you want that, then you can use this configuration as a base material in a blend/shellac material.
For my renders here I’m using iray. Unfortunately, iray in 3ds Max currently does not offer a way to put a coating/layer on a material. However, it’s not too difficult to achieve by rendering a black reflective layer and overlaying it onto the original render. That’s exactly what I did for this next image:
Here’s a shot of the reflection render + mask for the alucobond materials only:
And a closeup render of the material with the “coating” overlaid in Photoshop. TIP: Be sure to add the reflection layer using an additive mode like screen or Linear Dodge (add).
That’s about it I guess. Like I mentioned at the beginning, this may not be the exact look you’re after but it could be a good starting point. For example, if you wanted a darker, more glossy look you could decrease the reflection glossiness and darken the diffuse color a bit for this:
While I used iray in my examples here you can recreate this with most any render engine. Scenes like this are perfect for iray since it’s very quick for glossy reflections and exterior type scenes. Regardless of the render engine you use please keep in mind how important the environment map is on reflective objects.
One last tip, you may also want to add a bit of noise/distortion to the panels since nothing is perfectly flat.
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Alucobond Material In Mental Ray - GFX WARRIOR
[...] the reflection glossiness and darken the diffuse color a bit. You can read this tutorial at: Jeff ... -
how can i create Alucobond material help please
[...] FYI, Jeff Patton has a tutorial for Mental Ray. material recipe: alucobondjeffpatton.net | jeffpatton.net [...]
hi jeff , firstly thank you for this great post.
i need to ask u about product rendering , i have watched simmsimaging and they have really good rendered images.
for example liquid or other small products, a setup for their lightning and also professional materials for extreme close ups.
can you post a blog on how to setup an extreme professional studio lightning ,
thanks man
Brett creates some beautiful images for sure. I’ll keep this topic in mind as a future blog article.
Great material. Autodesk need to pay you for using Iray too much.
BTW, Thanks in advance for studio setup related article.
Great! This method is cheaper than use blend or shellac material to render time. But with a bit more work.
Thanks Jeff!!!
Great tut Jeff,
I have two questions,
Do you apply the noise map to the bump slot or diffuse slot?
And how would you make the material including the glossy coating if it were rendered in mental ray??
Cheers
“Do you apply the noise map to the bump slot or diffuse slot?” – Bump.
“how would you make the material including the glossy coating if it were rendered in mental ray??” – Put both the alucobond material and glossy coating material inside a blend material or shellac material and mix accordingly.
Thanks Jeff! Excellent!
Thanks Jeff ! very nice looking !
Have you used a reference or used your intuitive workflow to achieve the IOR value?
and.. what format did you use to save Reflection Mask?
(and as a third question : Material ID path usually have colored ID, I think you’ve turned it to a black and white image for better imaging. or maybe you’ve used another way?)
“Have you used a reference or used your intuitive workflow to achieve the IOR value?” – No, as I mentioned in the article it’s all just guesstimate as I’m just going off of reference images I found online. The IOR value I used sounds pretty high to me for this material, but it provided the look I was after so I went with it.
“what format did you use to save Reflection Mask?” – .TIF
“Material ID path usually have colored ID, I think you’ve turned it to a black and white image for better imaging. or maybe you’ve used another way?” – I typically work with layers instead of material ID’s. I’ll select a layer, in this case Alucobond, and run the TIK Quick Passes script to generate a mask. There’s nothing wrong with the material ID/render elements method. I use this method in my day to day projects so it’s second nature to me and fits perfectly into my workflow.
Thanks for your reply Jeff !
And a tutorial with Vray plugin, it’s possible?
Try this as a starting point for a VRayMtl:
Diffuse = 128,128,128
Reflect = 191,191,191
Fresnel reflections = on with a value of 40.0
Refl. glossiness = 0.65
(BRDF = Blinn mode or try Ward but you may need to increase the refl. glossiness with Ward)
Then if you want a coating on it you can run it through a VRayBlendMtl with your ‘coating’ layer.
Hi Jeff
Thanks for this tutorial. I use vray and with your comment above (how to set up the material in vray). In terms of the vrayblenmaterial can you elaborate on how to do that exactly?
Would be much appreciated.
Keep up the great work.
Peter
Let me know what version of 3dsmax you’re using and I’ll create a sample material.
Hi Jeff – awesome thanks im using max 2013 with vray
much appreciated.
Here’s a sample using the vray blend material.
As always, very relevant and useful tutorial. Thanks a lot, Jeff.
hi jeff , i have 2 QUestion for you , i`d be very thankful if you take time to answer them
1. in max 2012 when i acttivate the GI , the number of GI photon does not appear in the render message box. what`s wrong with it?
2. i got this warning a lot :API 0.0 warn 302032: while defining light “mr Sky Portal003|Light”: spot light has bad spread (cos of cone angle) -0.054312
what is it refering to?
actually i found the answer on my first Q which we should check the checkbox under rendering tab in preferences , the second Q still bites.
See Zaps reply HERE.
hi jeff , what gpu would suggest for a good hardware rendering perofrmance?
See the info I’ve provided HERE and HERE. Also the comments section on the second link has a lot of info on specific GPUs but that post is starting to show it’s age. I’ll probably need to provide an updated version once the new Kepler type GPUs are released.
BTW. you may have more intel , when do u think iRay would become more complete as a rrender engine which overcome all the aspects of rendering ?
and also , do you remember tehe becoming of max 2011 which importance and iradiance particles was introduced professionally?
never heard of them again so much , do they do anything actually?
“when do u think iRay would become more complete as a rrender engine which overcome all the aspects of rendering ?” – Not sure, but it seems to be a slow process of making these type render engines (GPU based) handle ALL the things we need from a render engine. Nothing really new with that problem though. Seems like I’ve never really found a single render engine that is optimal for every situation.
“do you remember tehe becoming of max 2011 which importance and iradiance particles was introduced professionally? never heard of them again so much , do they do anything actually?” – AFAIK Importons/IP weren’t formally rolled into 3ds Max. It’s yet another one of those hidden/secret features that users had to discover on their own. Of course as with so many other things like this, they had some issues (like not penetrating glass). So I’m not sure at this point if Importons/IP will ever become a direct option for 3ds Max mental ray users. Hopefully nvidia has some cool new tech planned for enhancing mental ray’s indirect illumination options further.
thanks jeff ,you always answer so kindly
hello sir
unit is impotent in lighting ?
Some time i work in my tow files then lighting is deference between tow files what is Problem ?
hi again , jeff do u know what is the sorest part of using mentalRay , it`s when you want to render an interior and by adding lights the final gather pass processing time increases dramatically .
i usually use photometric and portals. almost always enable far attenuation. and specify shadow samples 16 or 32 , photometric are always area lights .and mostly i turn of the specular due to reducing render tmes in interpolation ,
so , is there any way to optimize lights so that the final gather processing time reduce?
Sounds like you’ve done all you can to optimize the lights. You’ll of course want to make sure you aren’t expecting more from your workstation that it can provide too.
Beyond that, I would look into demos of other render engines (vray is pretty good for architectural scenes) and see if they work better on the types of scenes you create most. Never restrict yourself to just one render engine. Always explore the various options to find what works best for your scenes & hardware config.
Hello Jeff,
First, thanks for the great tutorials, they are really well done, and your results looks so awesome.
I have a few questions;
I’m actually new to the entire rendering thing, i built a small test scene with two unwrapped boxes and a plane, applied the alucobond material using your recipe, used mental ray renderer since iray refuses to run on my machine, and used daylight system/mrsun/mrsky/mrphysical sky, and the render result -no matter how hard i try- does not look good at all!.
And my questions are;
How do i achieve such a good looking plate-like feel? i tried applying a tile map to the material bump or displacement, but didn’t look as good.
And how do i get that soft surface of the material and soft reflections (in first result without the reflection coat) in dark areas? mine show noise on darker spots.
Also, using mrsun/sky/physical sky and setting the time to any thing from 10AM to 3PM the scene still looks dark, and manipulating with the exposure get the material to look washed out, how to set up a good lighting to show the material?
I know that the questions might require going into lots of details but any kind of help will be appreciated, any suggested tutorials or references to help me out with that.
And thanks again for your great tutorials.
Thanks SOOO Much mate
REally! good work and keep it up
HI! Jeff Patton
I have had many problems with reflections in my scenes, I wonder how you do
gandiosa to achieve excellence in their work, as I admire them all, follow your
website and blog where you post your work. If possible I would like to give me some tips on how to make
perfect reflections and what materials to use in HDR (environment) of scenes and settings to achieve a
acceptable level photorealistic.
For Example hdr map that you used in the tutorial environment where Alucobond or used?
Thank you for your attention
flavioartes3d@gmail.com
Brazilian’m sorry for bad English, thanks for listening, and thank you for the posts.
Big man Jeff Patton, thanks you