making a wheel that looks good

[Master chief]

OK on a model I'm working on a have a motorcycle of sorts that has a rather unique wheel design and i managed to find a real life version of said wheel

i can get a model part to look like the wheel but when it comes to actually making like like a wheel color wise I'm failing horribly , does any one happen to have a texture file or mat that would work well , its a high tech wheel from the future to make it specific

[robcat2075]

wheel color wise I'm failing horribly

 

can you show us what you have so far? The wheels on the example look too shiny for rubber. I'd think rubber would have low "specular intensity".

[Master chief]

the pic only shows what the shape of the wheel is , what I'm looking for is a way to make the texture that would normal go on a high tech wheel such as a shiny metallic for the rim and a rubber for the.... well wheel. i have tryed a few material file combinations but have so far failed horribly , also I'm not on my animation comp so i cant post the file but will hopefully be able to soon

[Rodney]

i have tryed a few material file combinations but have so far failed horribly

 

Don't forget that with reflective materials you must have something in the scene to reflect. If you are getting no reflection it is quite likely there is nothing there to reflect.

[heyvern]

Lighting and "environment" as Rodney said are crucial to any material. We could give you a "perfect" material for both the metal rim and rubber wheel but if it isn't lit well or have an environment around it to reflect it will look as bad as your failed attempts.

 

It's a tricky thing to pull off. There isn't any perfect solution. You need to study lighting and reflective surfaces in 3D. There is a a basic starting point for chrome type materials I use in AM. Specularity with a high intensity and medium to low size (like 85/35?). A little reflection or... a little more reflection (depending on how reflective you want it of course ). A high diffuse fall off percentage. I usually use a a medium dark gray with a high diffuse falloff and some reflectivity anywhere from 30-90% depending on what I want or what looks good in the chor lighting setup. If you render in the modeling window it will look like crappola though. Only one light and absolutely nothing to reflect. You need an environment... or....

 

Lately I've been using environment materials or projection map materials to simulate reflections. I use a small tiled blurry kind of dark to light image to create a nice reflective environment. It doesn't work in every situation though. Look for my Terminator endoskeleton thread. That is what I used for that. There is no environment reflecting it is just the material. It's a lot of trial and error. When you have a lot of irregular chrome shapes it works well. If you have flat or large smooth areas it doesn't look as realistic.

 

Rubber tires in my opinion are very simple surface materials. A very large specular size with a very low intensity.

 

-vern

[John Bigboote]

Should be said...that's a beautiful bike MC!

 

Maybe if you Google for an image that shows 'what you are going for' we can give better advice. Sometimes rubber is brushed down with oil to make it look more shiney...sometimes it is 'road weary' with dirt and smudges. Help us to help you, Bro!

[heyvern]

That bike does look good... but... yikes! Won't that be an awfully bumpy ride? I get sick just looking at it.

 

-vern

[Master chief]

all im looking for is a texture/mat file that will produce a nice shiny metal effect and a texture/mat file to produce something like rubber, im not good enough to be workign with lighting and such so i generaly go with a standard sun light that sets the whole field to......... well visible

[heyvern]

all im looking for is a texture/mat file that will produce a nice shiny metal effect and a texture/mat file to produce something like rubber, im not good enough to be workign with lighting and such so i generaly go with a standard sun light that sets the whole field to......... well visible

 

Exactly... that's my point. A "nice" one size fits all shiny material doesn't exist. It all depends on the lighting and the environment to determine if it looks "good". Many of the surface attributes I use only have a diffuse color, specular and that's it. They look "good" because of the lighting and render settings, mulitpass, raytraced shadows etc etc. There aren't any "easy" shortcuts. If something is not lit well it will look like crap. The best model in the world will look like crap if it isn't lit and rendered correctly. I struggle with lighting. Lighting is my nemesis. I have a model that is only... eh... so so looking... but man if I light it just right it can look like a million bucks. Lighting can make or break a 3D scene. I did a portrait of Dave Bowman from 2001 for the Sci fi image contest one year. I got my lighting set up directly from someone on the forum. A simple light set up with just 3 basic lights. I tweaked it around a bit but MAN! That light set up brought that model to life.

 

Study photography lighting web sites or books. Real world lighting knowledge can be of great use in 3D. I had a friend years ago who was a wiz with 3D lighting. He was not experienced at all with 3D but he had years of experience as a photographer and knew exactly how to put in lights in 3D programs.

 

There is another thing I do when creating shiny reflective chrome; I will sometimes use shapes around the shiny stuff that reflect into the metal to give it those nice... uh reflective thingies. When you see nice reflective chrome what makes it look "good"? It's the lights and darks of the reflected environment that wrap around the shape in a pleasing and realistic way.

 

Rubber can be pretty straight forward as I said. Dark gray color (to taste). 20-45% specular intensity, 90-100% specular size. Maybe some "noise"... very subtle. That's it. Just those attributes and you have rubber. You can change those values to change the surface properties of the rubber. If the rubber is "slick" or "hard" it might have a smaller specualar size with more strength. It might be a darker color. Maybe it's a tiny bit "shiny" or wet and would have a slight reflection... but then it starts to look like plastic.

 

Sometimes lighting alone can create an illusion of a "material". I remember seeing a tutorial for lighting a 3D car. It used different colored lights for specular values that created a sort of "SSS" effect on the "paint". The end result looked like a "real" car. But if you stuck that model or those materials in a chor with one light... it would look like crap.

 

-vern