Raphdog

Metallic Material Shading

Working with shading today in Blender as part of my learning, and so I wanted to work a bit with metals. I like the shiny look of silver, and I think nipple rings on muscley dudes are hot, so this was what I wanted to build.

My naïve attempts at metals in the past involved whipping out the principled BSDF and jamming the metallic up to 100%, and the roughness super low. It would look good on small decorations, even with jewellry in this case, but at a larger scale (like a futuristic interior) it just looks wrong - lacking severely in detail.

While researching I came across a Blender Guru tutorial on photorealistic metals, which helped me produce a really decent metallic look - as well as explain some of the theory - by using the glossy BSDF and a whole lotta nodes to make metals ‘correctly’.

I work with glTF quite a lot for web stuff, and I found that when I came to export my model for display in this post I got a model with no shader - fuck. As it turns out the glTF format only supports the principled shader, so I either had to figure out what ‘baking’ is, or figure out a different way of shading metals.

This was where another tutorial came in, from AGI explaining the same thing as Blender Guru but from a glTF-first perspective. As it turns out I could have just used a texture material, which also gave me a far better looking result with way less nodes to fiddle with.

My simple nipple ring model in silver, using a texture-based approach for metallic shading.

Then of course, I had to grab an Orc model to put them into use. I wanted to do some posing with the character later, so I also had to figure out how to attach meshes to existing armatures, which wasn’t too difficult - just had to find the correct bones to parent to.

Assets used