Metal material

[maverick]

Hi again,

I tried to do a metal material recently, and somehow it didn't look right. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something's off. Adding background for reflection doesn't help. I understand I'll have to make do with what there is in terms of shaders, so maybe, there's some trick to improve the looks of it.

Here are some of the renders.

Is it OK to post some cycles renders for comparison?

[maverick]

I forgot to give credit for the table model (a part of which is seen). It's from BlenderGuru.

[Samo]

In Yafaray there is a shader for metalic materials which is glossy. The issue is that the microfacet model used to diffuse the glossy reflection is not very good and it always produces too much of a "polished plastic" look. It is explained here:
http://www.yafaray.org/node/726

However, I don't think there is a "magic" shader in any program that really produces a true metalic look without a good deal of user work behind it. The two main tricks for a good metalic material are first layering several degrees of glossy and mirror reflections using a blend material, and second using good relief mapping with either bump or displacement.

[maverick]

Thanks for the tip.