Yes, I already had the feeling that a good bump map would be sufficient for what I try to achieve, no displacement needed for this one. That makes it simpler, but still I’m struggling to get it right.
Here is a picture of a bead blasted, stainless steel surface:
Usually I get away by just using the standard metal material from rhino and add either the “grit” or “speckle” bump. The last one fits better for this purpose. My surface is a bit bigger and the bead blasting structure is very fine, so I need the XXS or even XXXS scale for the map. With that scale you can see the pattern repeating, which is obviously not good.
I’ve tried to generate noise maps myself but I don’t get to the point where the repetition of the pattern isn’t obvious anymore.
I had hoped that with the new node based approach it would be doable, but I can’t find any working examples for rhino and I’m not able to apply what I see in the examples from blender in rhino.
Ups, sorry, the material from @theoutside does work. It was just white when I tried it the first time. With different light and scene it becomes visible. I’ll check out the included maps, but anodized look isn’t what I’m after anyway. EDIT: I just checked the included map files, they are not what I need.
Regarding the repeat setting, I don’t see that in the standard rhino-metal material, only size:
True, when I started this post I was actually trying to render bead blasted, anodized aluminium. Now, the new project uses bead blasted, stainless steel instead. Should probably start a new post that focuses more on the bead blasting aspect via bump/noise.
That is correct. You just play with the size setting, you don’t get other control. If you want to change that you need to change the type of the material from Metal to Custom.
I already got to the point where I tried “custom” and used noise maps a bump, but still hat that effect. But yes, there is that WCS setting and I had not tried that yet. I’ll update this post when I tried it…
@nathanletwory
WCS does not work, it produces a buggy looking mapping on some sides of the object. WCS box works in terms of mapping. I will then have to use a very different size value. But the problem remains, I can see the pattern produced by the repetition of the map. I have tried to make really big maps, like 2048px and 4096px but that even that does not help. This is why I had hoped that the new node based approach where I don’t plug in a texture but a noise node instead would work.
During the summer I will be natively implementing all of the Rhino procedurals in Cycles. Only then we’ll get seamless noise textures. Until then Rhino procedurals will be baked and always exhibit this problem.
