Gold Material
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Oct 17th
2007
Updated On: Sept 25th 2020
Here's a tutorial on how to create a gold material in a number of
different ways for 3dsmax, although the theory will work for any
3d app or renderer.
I highly recommend reading my Reflections
And Highlights tutorial first, as it will discuss what a diffuse
reflection is, a specular reflection is, how a specular reflection and
a "reflection" relate to each other, etc. Also, before reading this
page, you must read my Chrome Material
lesson. Gold is really chrome with gold colored reflections, so this
page will only contain the info necessary to turn the chrome materials
on that page into gold.
Polished Raytraced Gold
The basic ingredients are as follows:
- GGX Shader ideally (But Blinn or Phong will do)
- Almost Black Diffuse (The brighter the Diffuse the more it will
look like an alloy, ie, a mixture of a metal and another material)
- High Specular Reflectivity tinted Gold, I picked the color RGB
185, 148, 69
- Almost 100% Glossiness
- Fresnel Reflections, IOR between 6 and 20
Now that we have the theory, lets show how to create the effect in 3d
using a number of different 3d apps and renderers.
3dsmax's
Raytrace Material in Scanline Renderer
Here's an example file to make a scene like the image above using
3dsmax's Scanline Renderer:
polished_raytraced_gold_scanline.zip
(Requires 3dsmax 8 or later, Scanline Renderer)
The material is a Raytrace Material. Set
the diffuse
to Black. Add a falloff map to the reflect slot, set to fresnel, check
the Override Material IOR checkbox, give it an IOR of 20. Set the
colors in the falloff map to RGB 185, 148, 69. Turn off
specular highlight if
you want to use real raytraced reflections only and not light the scene
with specular lights.
If you do want specular highlights,
make sure to
tint them the same gold color (remember, specular highlights are really
faked reflections, so both the reflections and highlight should have
the same color).
Remember, half of what makes a material
look like a particular material is the environment it's in.
A wise man said reflections only look as good as the environment the
object
is reflecting, keep that in mind. For this scene, I have a a smooth
gradient from white (low) to black (high). I also have a few self
illuminated white cards near the camera to appear in reflections.
These
cards have an output map in the diffuse slot, and a higher then 1 RGB
level,
which blows out the cards to values above white, making them appear
brighter
in reflections.
3dsmax's
Brazil Advanced Material in Brazil Rio Renderer
Here's an example file to make a scene like the image above using
3dsmax's Brazil Renderer:
polished_raytraced_gold_brazil.zip
(Requires 3dsmax 5 or later, Brazil Rio)
The first material in the file is a Brazil Advanced Material. This
is an identical setup to the Raytrace Material above.
The second uses the Brazil Chrome Material. These materials are
quite similar. The Chrome Material automatically has no diffuse, turn
the reflections on, note that
there's no IOR control, this material will be 100% reflective. While an
IOR of 20 is ALMOST perfectly reflective, it's not completely, and so
you'll notice a little of the black diffuse color peaking through on
the Brazil Advanced Material. This material has none of that. Set the
Filter Color to RGB 185, 148, 69. Turn off
specular highlight if
you want to use real raytraced reflections only and not light the scene
with specular lights. Note: the advantage of using the chrome material
is that it's more optimized than the Advanced material (since it's been
specifically written only for chrome), so it'll render faster. The
disadvantage is that if you want to add a little diffuse back to your
material, you can't, hence I would generally recommend using the
Advanced Material since it's more flexible, but the choice is yours.
3dsmax's VrayMtl
Material in Vray Renderer
Here's an example file to make a scene like the image above using
3dsmax's Vray Renderer:
polished_raytraced_gold_vray.zip
(Requires 3dsmax 2014 or later, vray 2.4, ColorCorrect)
This uses a VrayMtl Material, the diffuse is black, the reflect
color has our gold color in it (note, the gold color is wrapped in a
ColorCorrect map to set the gamma correctly, since this scene uses
Linear Workflow). Fresnel Reflections on, Fresnel IOR is set to 20.
Otherwise, the file is identical to the other two examples.
Polished Environment Mapped
/ Polished Environment Mapped and Raytraced Gold
Again, in the Chrome Material
lesson I also mention these two other types of Chrome. To make the same
material, but have them be gold, just follow the Chrome instructions,
and replace the reflect color for gold like I do in this tutorial.
