Metal look

Troubleshooting graphics
1

Hi

  can anyone tell a noob how to get a shiny metal look from xsi or likewise?

2

I would suggest modulating MaterialState (with high shininess and white specular highlights) with some very nice texture and perhaps even an Environmental Mapping.

3

Hi Duenez

  I am trying to get this shine effect and starting from xsi and exporting an  .obj but although I can see this great shine in the view port and render it doesnt carry through to jm.

I would prefer also not use a texture as i am after a clean look.

    Any suggestions ?

4

The problem with what you are saying is that the renderer (XSI for instance) is most certainly using a ray-tracing algorithm to display the object’s material. To have something similar, without a texture, you will almost certainly need Environmental mapping: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/texture/texture/env.html



Take into account that it will not be real reflections, and thus, if you get an object near this metal-looking one, it will not reflect. Of course you can get better looking results if you use a Render to Texture strategy, but it is a lot more costly. Finally, you could try to use a shader to achieve some results.

5

Nice one Duenez, yeh I am doing that already for example with an hdri file to acheive great effects in XSI but that material does not translate it seems to JM. Could you be a bit more specific or talk me through what file types or shaders work or the typical workflow.

      Thanks a lot

6

if you interested in shaders there are a few shader ide’s out there that offer hdr, environmental mapping, and some even have a material library.  There is the Nvidia shader Library, believe all those are all in Cg, jme only supports glsl, and there are converters out there. 

NVIDIA Shader Library - http://developer.download.nvidia.com/shaderlibrary/webpages/shader_library.html

FX Composer 2 (shader ide) - http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html

ATI’s Render Monkey (shader IDE) - http://ati.amd.com/developer/rendermonkey/index.html

and my personal favorite Typhoon Labs glsl ide - http://www.typhoonlabs.com/




7

Nice one Patrick, that will take me a few days to chew over!  :smiley: