Metal
 
 
 

Category: mental ray > Materials

Shader Family: Surface Material

Output: Color

This shader creates a truly realistic metal by modelling a metallic object's reflective properties, including color filtering of the reflected rays and blurring of the reflected images.

Name

The name of the shader node displayed in the render tree. Enter any name you like, or leave the default.

Surface Material

Input color computed by an illumination shader and modified by the Metal shader.

Reflectivity

The multiplier used to mix the input Surface Material color and the Metal effect. A value of 0 influences the result color by the input color only. A value of 1 influences the result color solely by the Metal effect.

Reflect Color

Tints the reflection. Typically, it is the same as the specular color used to compute the input Surface Material color by the illumination shader.

Tinting is the coloration that metal gives light as it reflects from its surface. Colors are filtered instead of mixed so that blacks stay black, and saturated colors remain saturated (although possibly filtered to a new hue).

Blur Reflection

Activates reflection blurring.

Blurring can be used to blur the reflections seen on the surface of the metal. The blurring is achieved by shooting multiple rays into a scene, each in a slightly different direction, and then mixing the results. The number of the extra rays determines the quality of the blur: more rays give a better blur but also take longer.

Spread

Controls the spread of the extra rays. A wider angle of spread gives a more blurred image, and narrower angle of spread gives a sharper images. A larger setting for the spread value will require a higher Samples setting to maintain quality.

Samples

Controls how many extra rays are used. Generally, a larger value will improve the quality of the blur but will also take longer to render.