Alright my metal mesh tutorial seems to have been lost to the MF time casm, so Im going to go ahead and write it again. I did some work for NZXT a while back and I had to come up with a way to do metal mesh. Sucking ass at making maps, I went for procedurals, and this is what I came up with. It renders quickly (especially compared to displacement and other options for making a million tiny holes), and requires very few actual polys to look proper. You can pretty much zoom into it infinitely and it will maintain enough of an illusion to fool the eye into thinking there is depth where there isnt.
Here's a preview of what the end result is (this is with a raytrace material), click for higher res:
To get this result, start off by making your base material. If you want/need a reflective material, you may want to start with a raytrace material. You wont be able to convert easily from one to the other once your done.
Once you have your base mat set, change its color to a dark dark gray color. Then set its specular to 120 and its glossiness to 10 (adjust to suit your situation if needed). Also, make sure you tick the "two-sided" option at the top of the material window for this material.
Next, add a falloff to the reflection slot of your material (if you started with a raytrace material), and change its type to fresnal:
Then, in the transparency slot, add a gradient ramp. Change its type to radial, and adjust the colors to black and white as you see in the following image. This is where you set the size of the holes. The further the black goes to the left, the smaller your holes will be:
Then copy this map to your specular level, glossiness, and bump slots, and set your bump to -10 (as we want the holes to look like they are going in, and not out). Heres a reference image:
now just apply to your object, adjust tiling as needed for your object to make your holes round, and render.
You can also use a very low shell modifier on your mesh to create the illusion of depth in the holes, like so:
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FronatanorF
read 1257 times
12/2/2007 1:02:33 AM (last edit: 12/2/2007 1:14:46 AM)
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