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How to make a real metallic material in Octane

How to get a Real Metal material in Octane Render

In Octane 3.08 a new material has been added, the Metallic material, that allows to us to achieve physically corrected and measured metals.

In this article I will describe how to make a measured metal shader in Octane Render 3.08 and above for LightWave 3D but this workflow is the same in all distributions of Octane Render.

Step 1: find the right data source

To do this kind of work we need a reliable source of physically informations about different types of materials and one of the best web sites able to do this job is refractiveindex.info.

In this web site you can find a great database of material's optical costants that are the results of different type of measurements.

For our data acquisition be careful to use only measurements pages where wavelenghts intervals are into the range we need to acquire.

refractiveindex.info web site

Step 2: get measured data

According with this post in the OTOY forum we will acquire the n and k values, for the red/green/blue wavelengths, using the following settings:

RED  0.65 µm

GREEN  0.55 µm

BLUE  0.45 µm

then fill the related fields in the Metallic Material.

Measured Metallic gold settings

Examples of measured metals

Aluminium

Aluminium

Aluminium

Aluminium

Brass | 70% Cu - 30% Zn

Brass | 70% Cu - 30% Zn

Brass | 90% Cu - 10% Zn

Brass | 90% Cu - 10% Zn

Chromium

Chromium

Copper

Copper

Gold

Gold

Gold

Gold

Iron

Iron

Lead

Lead

Platinum

Platinum

Silver

Silver

Titanium

Titanium

Tungsten

Tungsten

Vanadium

Vanadium

Zinc

Zinc

Download the test scene for LightWave 3D

The login is mandatory to download. If you don't have an account go to the User Registration page.




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