This tutorial will take you through the process of making a realistic metal armour texture that looks great and is transferrable to any scene. Normally you'd be using the reflection of the scene itself to generate the metallic look to armour, however as many of you will know, you don't often have the time or the need to create a whole scene just to act as a reflection. So this tutorial is designed to show a really, really quick way of getting a realistic metal armour in a matter of minutesTo demonstrate this I have used a set of maps from Medieval Textures (armor004):
However if you don't have the collection, you can use any others you've produced.
Getting started
Create a new material and set it up with the following settings:
- Diffuse color: R:39, G:39, B:39
- Specular Level: 60
- Glossiness: 25
In the map slots put the relevant maps (eg color in the color slot, bump in the bump etc) and set the following levels: - Bump: 150
- Displacement: 10
- Reflection: 90
- (you may need to tweak these to suit your particular scene)
Now to add the metallic reflection to our armour texture we need to add a reflection, so click on the reflection map slot and choose 'raytrace'. Under Background, click the map slot and add an environment map (any hdr image or sky texture you have). It's important to play around at this point and try out different maps as this has a huge effect on your finished image.
That's pretty much it. Just create your scene, it can be as simple as you like - I've created a sphere and added two lights and hit render and got this:
