Now we control which parts of the model appear dark and rusty, and which parts appear shiny and metallic!ĮXPLORING THE MATERIAL GRAPH’S CURVATURE NODE What you now have is a shiny metal ‘coating’ sitting on top of a dirty, rusty metal. Once you’ve made Material 2, link it to the Final Material Node using the Label option.
Where Material 1 is rough and dark, Material 2 is shiny and golden. Apart from the bump, which essentially stays the same in both materials, the color and roughness are fundamentally the opposite. Right-click in the empty space and create a new metal material, with image maps controlling its color, roughness, and bump.
Since Material 1 is the base material, Material 2 will sit on top of it as a layer… or in Keyshot parlance, a Label. Play around with the values to get a dark, rough-ish metal with barely any reflectivity… and then make Material 2, which is just the opposite. Depending on the whites and blacks and greys in the texture maps, the material has high or low roughness, or a higher or lower bump. The material interprets these texture images as data to control its properties. Similarly, drop a texture into the Bump section too (with a low bump height) to create that undulating imperfect surface. The key is always factoring imperfections into the model, so rather than just using the same color and roughness throughout, we’ll use texture maps to make sure the color and roughness of the old metal are inconsistent. Once you’ve set the scene up with the model, start by opening the material graph and making the old metal first. A model with real-world imperfections will result in a material that’s believable and realistic. Remember that your material will only be as good as your model. It’s perfect for our aged material because it has a stony texture with a stunning amount of detail that causes the material to look incredibly realistic. Fun fact, the model is a scanned historic artifact titled ‘Portrait of a Bearded Man’ made in Marble back in the Hellenistic Period in 150 B.C.
I’ll explain how we do that, but first, let’s create the two materials.īefore we begin, I’ve set up my scene using a model of the Bearded Man, downloaded for free from Three D Scans. Once you create these two materials, it’s just a question of adding them together in a way that allows the right metal to show up in the right place. Material 1 is an old, aged, dirty brownish metal, Material 2 is a shiny, golden/bronze metal. If you look at the image above, or the material graph below, you see two broad materials. The best way to look at this complex material is by splitting it into its subsequent parts. Imperfections are what make life real and embracing them is a great way to make your 3D renders feel “life-like”. You seldom see a phone without some smudges on its screen, or a table without a bit of dust or scratches, or a leather bag without patina. Scratches, dust, fingerprints, dirt accumulated in tiny corners, signs of aging, all this plays a heavy role in making the eyes believe what they see. Imperfections form a major part of what makes a render photorealistic. You can use this technique to make all sorts of material variants, like rusted iron, oxidized silver, or even aged bronze that’s turning green around the crevasses.
Read further to see how to build this aged, oxidized, grungy material in Keyshot’s Material Graph. Combine them and in no time, you’ll have a material that behaves exactly the way you want it to… because it was designed to! All you need is a little patience and the ability to spot how your material reacts when you make changes to it in the material graph. I’m probably making it sound complicated, but here’s the truth – it really isn’t. You can pick and choose various aspects of different materials, creating a visually gorgeous mishmash of nodes and blocks to ‘build’ a material that looks stunningly real. If Keyshot’s material library is a restaurant menu-card, the material graph is literally the most versatile salad bar you’ve ever seen.
Keyshot’s Material Graph offers the ability to go beyond simply tweaking a material’s color, roughness, or refractive index.