CG Education

Gold Material
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Oct 17th 2007
Updated On: May 17th 2009

Here's a tutorial on how to create a gold material in a number of different ways for 3dstudio max, although the theory will work for any renderer. I highly recommend reading my Metals and Reflections 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.

Gold 1 Gold 2 Gold 3

Polished Raytraced Gold

The basic ingredients are as follows:

No Diffuse (Black Diffuse)
Fresnel Reflections, IOR between 8 and 20
The reflections are tinted gold, I picked the color RGB 185, 148, 69

Here's the max file that made the image above, max5, brazil rio: polished_raytrace_gold.zip

The first material in the file is a Brazil Advanced 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).

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.

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.

Blurry Raytraced Gold

The basic ingredients are as follows:

No Diffuse (Black Diffuse)
Blurred Fresnel Reflections, IOR between 8 and 20
The reflections are tinted gold, I picked the color RGB 185, 148, 69

Here's the max file that made the image above, max5, brazil rio: blurry_raytraced_gold.zip

Identical to the polished gold above, except I turned on Brazil's Glossy Reflection Control, and set the Glossiness to 60. Now the reflections will be blurred. Play with the Max Error value to find the perfect balance between speed and image quality.

Blurry Environment Mapped Gold

The basic ingredients are as follows:

No Diffuse (Black Diffuse)
Environment Map
Fresnel Reflections, IOR between 8 and 20, attenuated by a Shadow/Light Map
The reflections are tinted gold, I picked the color RGB 185, 148, 69

Here's the max file that made the image above, max5. It contains both a material for use with Brazil rio, and a raytrace material version for those of you who are using the scanline renderer in max: blurry_envmapped_gold.zip Note that in the scene I used a raytrace material, but even though the name is raytrace, you can set it to not raytrace, and use an environment map instead. Just wanted to reiterate that a raytrace material doesn't always have to raytrace.

Blurry Environment Mapped and Raytraced Gold

The basic ingredients are as follows:

No Diffuse (Black Diffuse)
Environment Map and Raytracing
Blurred Fresnel Reflections, IOR between 8 and 20, attenuated by a Shadow/Light map
The reflections are tinted gold, I picked the color RGB 185, 148, 69

Blurry Environment Mapped and Raytraced Gold

Here's the max file that made the image above, max5, brazil rio: blurry_env_ray_gold.zip

Here's the deluxe model, it contains an environment map AND raytracing. The idea being that objects in your scene will be reflected, however, you don't have to build an entire environment for your objects, you can replace any part of your scene that doesn't have actual geometry with an environment map. I use this quite a lot, it's sort of the best of both worlds, so I can build whatever I need to of my environment, have that reflected, and then have the rest taken care of with an environment map.

The same settings as above, except make sure the Mode is set to Raytrace.

Dialogue 3

With raytrace set, it will both raytrace, and if you have something in your environment map slot, it will also do environment mapping. If the slot is empty, it will only raytrace. And make sure you have the 2 falloff setup, since you don't want your environment map glowing.