Realistic Gold Ring reflections

#1

Hey guys

i work on a gold ring and i’m totally frustrated because it looks absolutely not realistic enough because the reflections looks ehm… strange :sad: i use maya 2015 and mentalray.

her is how it looks so far:

EDIT: after correcting the gamma and switch to linear workflow, it looks better, but i have still problems with the edge reflections…

my setup:

  • mia_material_x
  • IBL for global reflections
  • Arealight for soft shadows
  • camera with an exposure_photographic

my shader settings:

i try to use the fresnel, but then i get an even shittier result…

have anybody an idea?

Thanks,
Marco

#2

Hey,

I got pretty good results for a gold shader by checking the Metal material. Since gold is a metal :stuck_out_tongue: . Not sure what you mean by strange reflections. Are you going for a gold with blurry reflections? Otherwise I would make it a bit less blurry. You could also try adding some caustics. Anyway my 2 cents :slight_smile: .

#3

hay

i tried the metal option as well, but it the effect is the same as when i use the same color for reflection and diffuse.

my problem with thre reflection is, that in my opinion the dark spots are too big compared to real-life footage of a gold ring like:

#4

Please use the appropriate forums, rendering questions in the rendering subforum.
Moving this for you.

#5

The reflection blur is much less on the photo than in the render. I’d take that down (ie. up in value) so its less blurry in the render. Perhaps drive some of that glossiness with a scratches image applied very lightly. Also, if you are working in linear workflow make sure your reflection image is linearized so that it will appear darker in the reflections.

Also, just as a rule, the darkness in the reflection will simply be because of how dark the env you have to contrast in the reflection in the first place.

Here is a quick doodle example.

#6

I don’t think the IoR changes the reflectivity if Fresnel isn’t on. I guess I’m super uptight about control since I never use the “metal material” checkbox heh. My usual approach is a low value color in the diffuse and a full value in the reflection color, the color totally depending on the alloy(yellow gold/red gold/white gold), all at around 50-70% saturation and I often refrain from setting anything to 100% reflectivity.

So I think a few things are at play here. The reflection color has too high saturation(and it doesn’t appear to be full value so it’s dulling the highlights, I prefer to leave that to the reflectivity attr) so even the brightest parts of the reflections are still kind of a burnt yellow and this is being spread all over the surface by the degree of blurring happening.

#7

thank you guys. i think i got it :slight_smile:

my problem was the intensity of the IBL and as a result of this i got those really big dark reflections on my ring. i also increased the glossyness to get more sharpen reflections.

coloring and other finetuning goes now to photoshop…

any inputs what needs still some optimizations?

here is an actual render:

Marco