Claymore, procedural material practice

Ahoy,
I’m very new to modelling, texturing and well… everything regarding CG and everytime I tried to make a good looking metal material it looked horrible so I decided to work on this.
I tried to make fully procedural metal materials and thought a sword (in this case a claymore) would be a great model to test different metals.
Everything in this scene is procedural except the hdr lighting, the sword isn’t finished yet, it still lacks a good transition between the handle and the cross-guard and one of these long metal pieces coming from the cross-guard upwards along the blade, don’t know the name.
I would like to get some feedback on both, the model and the materials.

Render:


Material test on a simple model:


Harle

did u try with a good HDRI map
would give better spec on metal!

show us the mesh verts !

happy bl

show us the material settings please i wanna learn how to do it that

Heyho,
just took some shots of the mesh and the node-setup

Mesh:


And the node-setup I used for the parts of the claymore is basically the one I used on the ingot just with a few more variations and some more features like worn edges and stuff.

The basic one of the ingot:


As a pattern for surface variations I use a Musgrave texture to control the glossy roughness as well as the glossy color and the bumpyness.
The glossy color should be a variation of extremely light complementary colors (blue and orange in my case).

With these nodes for the Scratches:


I use a mix of 2 noise textures as a mask for the scratches, just that the object has some variations of the scratches (some parts got more scratches, some less).

@RickyBlender Yes I uses HDRI maps but I don’t know if they’re good xD I’m a total noob of lighting. Some advices on that would be great too xD

Can’t say i use procedural textures much, but the nodes would be interesting. could you show us?

Well I don’t know why my posts aren’t that fast posted…I see people answer in my thread while I’m still waiting to see my post I wrote hours before… is it cause I’m new to the forum?

Anyway, I just posted a simplified version of the node-setup I used in the Reply I wrote before which still isn’t shown. If you’re interested in the full node setup…well…it’s big…but I could show it too.

I like to use procedural textures/materials cause I’m lazy and I really like to recycle materials AND I’m not good at using images…I have trouble to allign textures properly or unwrap properly. I just tried to make a high-poly tree and it was aweful to get the bark looking ok…I spent about 10 times the time to adjust the textures/materials than I spent in modelling, so my goal is to get everything done with procedurals xD

i use some of the Studio HDRI
but you have to select the right one!
some are more or less dark
one that is light is the Studio 23 which is like and gives a lot of spec reflections !

try it and see what it gives !

did u take your nodes set up from someone else or did it yourself ?

there is one for weathering did u see that one ?

happy bl

Impressive !! I don’t use procedural so much either but the results are very good. I heard that they’re better for fast render times. I wish I could do procedural like you, you’re quite skilled. Youre node setups give me headaches !! I will try to reproduce it and tweaks things to learn more about it. Thanks for the node stup post.

Hey again,
@RickyBlender don’t know which pack of HDRIs you mean, is it this?
I’ll look into it anyways tomorrow but just to be sure I get what you meant.
And yes I basically did the node setup myself, I just got the idea to use a multifractal musgrave texture from a tutorial I saw, before I played around with noise texture or fBM musgrave but multifractal is just the best one here.
Ye I saw something about weathering effects but can’t remember where, I will look for it.

@SOL_33 As I said, the node-setup I posted is just the one of the ingot. For the parts of my claymore I tuned this a bit, more scratches at the edges of the blade, worn edges and stuff, but if you use this one as a basis it should work. I’m glad you like it :slight_smile:

check if name start with Studio and number!

check these here

http://www.hdrlabs.com/news/index.php?id=2469256454757487858

I remember there was a special nodes set up for sword steel
have you seen it ?

happy cl

I think I got the right HDRI pack, number 23 works pretty well and I did a little test render, same amount of samples as before just the camera is a little bit different cause I moved it around to test something.
It’s SUCH A BIG DIFFERENCE!



And I see I have to redo the blade completely, other parts are ok, a bit fine-tuning and they’re fine, also invert the bump of scratches… but the blade looks aweful.

And no, I think I haven’t seen a special node setup for swords, would be great if you could post it.

Hi Harlehatschi,
I really like the scratches on your ingot, and I tried to reproduce them. Unfortunately, without much success. I guess, the main ingredient that I am missing is the custom node called “Vector Random…” or something with the TextureCoordinate node.
Would you care to show your node setup completely or even upload it as a blend file?
Thanks a lot, node master! :slight_smile: