Good fresnel settings - incidence angle gradient

[thomas]

Hi people,

I'm looking for good gradient incidence angle materials to make some quality materials - actually, I'm trying to achieve a v-ray style look, but even just putting a chrome and shiny plastic sphere in a white room doesn't look as good, and I think it has to do with my incidence angle gradients.

Does anyone have any good materials or settings to share? I have a feeling that my materials look a bit fake because I'm only using two keys in my gradient - one for the 0 degrees angle and one for the 90 degrees angle. Somehow I get the feeling that in real life physics the fresnel effect stays lower for a long time, for example with the reflection value rising slowly from 0 to 60 degrees, and then rising fastly from 60 to 90 degrees. I get the same results with the transparency channel: if I make the gradient just linear between two keys it looks fake. If I keep the transparency high (above 85 percent) from 0 to 60 degrees, and then let it drop to 20 percent at 90 degrees, it looks a lot better.

Soo.. I have some clue as to what would make my materials look more realistic, but do any of you have concrete good values for this, because I feel as if I'm just screwing around here..

Thanks,
Thomas

[jure]

Hi,

here is basic setup that I use all the time for reflective materials. It does pretty much the same as Vray material - automaticaly compensating diffuse when reflection is used. It's made up of a couple of nodes and it works very well. If you have some question about it just ask...

[thomas]

Hey Jure!

Thanks for the material, and also thanks for reminding me that the special LW-material nodes work in Kray. I keep forgetting this, and to be honest I do much prefer working without nodes somehow. I guess I feel safer using my old methods Also, the old LW-channels are much easier to work with decals etc.

Naturally I do understand the diffuse + reflection < 100 percent rule, and I do set up my gradients this way in reflection and diffuse, but like I said the linear progression of values with just two keys (one on the frontal angle and one on the glancing angle) doesn't seem too realistic.

I have an idea! I'm going to make a scene with a dielectric sphere and one with simple LW-gradients and I'm going to laboriously copy values in Photoshop and LW to get them to look similar! I'll keep you guys posted on that.

Incidentally, I have just posted an abstract test render in the gallery section with a chrome sphere in it ( no checkerboard floor though )

Thx,
Thomas

[khan973]

Nodes are nothing to fear of! Really.
I used to fear them and it took me time to dig into it but seriously, you can do whatever you want.
Decals are not hard at all! Even better as you only need one instance of the image's alpha to use it everywhere.