I am working on another project for BigBoy Productions and I needed a realistic gold texture with proper reflections but which doesn’t take eons to render. Years ago I was very close to photorealistic gold but unfortunately I forgot a big deal about it. After playing around for days I finally came up with a good solution which I will present you in this tutorial.

Software used:

• 3D Studio MAX 6 (“3dsmax”)
• Brazil r/s V1.2.21 Plugin (“Brazil”)

Recommended Skills

• This tutorial is very basic and mainly for beginners starting with 3dsmax. So don’t worry.
• You should only know how to create new objects in 3dsmax and have Brazil properly installed, which shouldve been the toughest part however

The Goal

• Creating a realistic looking gold texture within 3dsmax.
• Gaining basic knowledge about the Material Editor and Brazil’s rendering settings
• Optimizing the rendering process

Let’s do it!

1. Start up 3dsmax and set the rendering engine to Brazil if it isn’t your default engine. If you already know how to do this you can continue with 7
2. Open the render settings clicking this icon on the upper left or hit F10.
3. Now scroll down to where one bar reads “Current Renderers” (“Renderer zuweisen”) and click it, so it expands. Scroll down until you can see the three assigned renderers for “Production”, “Material Editor” and “ActiveShade”. If all read “Default Scanline Renderer” you have to set the Production rendering to Brazil.
4. Assuming you’ve properly installed Brazil click on the dots next to “Production:” and highlight “Brazil r/s V1.2.21” in the pop-up selection box and hit OK.
5. Notice that now also the Material Editor’s renderer is set to Brazil, which is bad becase Brazil doesn’t support it. So we have to change it back to the “Default Scanline Renderer”.
6. Hit the yellow button depicting a closed lock just right of the “Material Editor”. The icon should now show turn grey and view an open lock - the renderer should change to “Default Scanline Renderer”. Check the picture below to see if you’ve done it the right way. Don’t mind the German descriptions.



7. Close the Render Settings by clicking on it’s X-button in the very upper right.
8. Now open the material editor via hitting M on your keyboard. If every slot reads “not supported” its rendering is set to Brazil. In that case continue at 1).



9. Click the “Standard” (1) button and select “Brazil Chrome” (2) and hit “OK” (3). Now we’ve got a pretty neat chrome material but not at all golden. Note that a reflecting metal doesn’t have a color itself, it rather filters the reflected environment in a characteristic way – so forget all of the “Gold Diffuse Textures” you found on the web. Gold only reflects the yellow and orange light of the spectrum.
10. Rename the material from “01 – Default” to “Gold” or similar.
11. Below, click the white rectangle right of “Filter” and a color-picker palette should pop-up. Select a warm yellow tone. I used the following settings: Red 255, Green 207, Blue 23. Click “Close”.



12. The “Glossy Reflection Control” section. First of all, what does it mean? Glossy reflection control determines how diffuse the reflection on the material is. It takes a lot longer but looks more realistic if turned on.



I rendered the above samples on a 2GHz Intel Pentium M with 1GB of RAM in highest quality with Global Illumination (GI) turned on. The little stopwatches indicate the rendering time in minutes.

For the gold-material I chose to keep the initial glossiness value of 80. If you want it blurrier, decrease it, if you want it crisper, increase it up to 100. In terms of rendering performance the glossiness value doesn’t really matter. Only if it is below 40 it slows everything down a little.

Also important for the rendering time is the sample rate. Initially it is set to 10 which guarantees a pretty smooth surface but takes quite long too. I chose a value of 4 this time, but it depends: If the golden object is very close to the camera, I would boost it up to 10 or even 13. If it was only in the background, a value of 2 or even 1 would be sufficient.

Below there are four enlarged examples of the cube’s reflection with different sampling rates of the glossy reflection control. Note that the value in the stopwatches indicates the time it took to render the whole image, not only the enlarged cutout. Glossiness Level was 50 in all four examples.



Please note: The graininess is also dependent on Brazil’s Image sampling rate and last but not least the Global Illumination Shade rate. For a detailed walkthrough see addendum A.
13. Still in the Material Editor scroll down to the group called “Highlight Parameters”. This is where we define what the highlight of our material looks like.
14. Click on the rectangle left of “Specular Col.” and pick the same warm yellow tone as above, maybe a little more yellow. I used the following settings: Red: 255, Blue: 236, Green: 23
15. Below there’s the value “80” next to “Level”. This will define how bright the highlight will be. I exaggerated it a bit and set it to 200, so the material will reflect a very bright light white instead of the orange we’ve defined for the specular color, just because it is so intense.
16. Now click the long gray button reading “none” right of “Glossiness”. The “Material/Map Browser” will pop up another time. Select “Speckles” (“Flecken”) and hit “OK”. Why so? I want the gold to look a little like car paint and with the speckles we simulate the encapsulated metal particles underneath a perfectly smooth surface.

The following settings kept me busy for days until they looked right, so you just have to trust me if you want it to look like my texture; or play around with the settings a little yourself.

17. Under the “Speckle Parameters” set the size from 0.1 to 2. Pretty big speckles you might think, but we aren’t finished yet.
18. Click the gray map button reading “None” next to “Color #2”.
19. Again the “Material/Map Browser” pops up where we select “Speckles” – again.
20. Here keep the size of 0.1 but change the color of “Color #2” by clicking on the white rectangle to open the color picker dialog box.
21. Here change the value of “Value” from 256 to 188, or enter 188 for Red, Green and Blue.

Now what did we do that for? We balanced the amount of the speckles so that it still looks natural. I played a long time with it so I know what I am talking about. To get a better understanding of what we just did save your work so far and try playing around with different gray tones for “Color #1” and “Color #2”.

>Important to understand is that in 3dsmax there are hierarchies in the material editor. In our case the base material is “Brazil Chrome”. On the first level below there is the fist “Speckles”-map for the glossiness of the “Brazil Chrome”-material. And even below, on sub-level two, there is the “Speckles”-map of “Color #2” of the “Speckles”-map for the glossiness of the “Brazil Chrome”-material. Sounds complicating, but once you are used to it it’s very practical because there is no limit in sub-levels.

If you want you can interlink thousands of maps into thousands of sub-layers.



To get up one hierarchy hit the “Go to parent” (“Gehe zu übergeordnetem Objekt”) button which can be found far right on the toolbar below the swatches (the spheres with the textures). The picture below describes the hierarchy a little.



22. Now hit the “Go to parent” button until it gets gray which means there is no more level above and see if your settings match those below:
23. 

24. That’s it! You only have to assign the material to an object in your scene. You do this by dragging and dropping it from the swatch in the Material Editor to the object.
25. Adjust the render settings (see addendum A!) and hit F9 to render.



Maybe your scene looks a little like mine on the picture to the left and now you wonder why everything is so dark and not really golden. Because, just as mentioned above, gold only looks like gold when there’s enough to reflect. And in a scene with just one spotlight there ain’t much. You can either build a huge scene around it or already have, or you can mock up a softbox-setup like in a photographer’s studio. I photographed a lot reflective objects and it is pretty hard to make it look like metal.

But especially when you need to render just a golden logo you don’t have the time to model a complete softbox setup. That’s why we create a nice reflection just for the gold material in five minutes or less.
26. In the “Top” viewport create a sphere or geosphere big enough that your scene including lights and cameras fits easily in. This will be our environment. Of course, you could do this in the “Environment” dialog, but then it wouldn’t be so easily controllable.



27. Now back to the Material Editor. Select a gray sphere from the swatches and rename it to “Environment”.
28. Click the rectangles next to “Diffuse” and “Specular” and make them both completely black by entering 0 in for “Value” in the color picker.
29. Also set the “Specular Level” and the “Glossiness” to 0, just to make sure.
30. But set the value for “Self Illumination” to 75. You can increase or decrease this value later, when you think the environmental reflection is too weak or too strong.
31. EDIT: Be sure to click the “2-Sided” tickbox unless your sphere will have no inside and hence will leave background and reflections black. Thanks for that, jintriag!
32. Now click the little grey square just right of “Diffuse” to open the “Map/Material Browser”. Now select “Gradient Ramp” (“Verlaufsart”) and hit “OK”.
33. Now you can see a smooth ramp from black to white. You can add a color by clicking somewhere into the gradient and a green key appears on the lower side. Double click the green key and the color picker pops up where you can set the color for the key’s position.

To delete a key click it and drag it left or right outside the gradient ramp. It will turn red and the mouse cursor will change to an upside down arrow with a trash bin. Release the mouse button and the key is deleted.

You can also click into the gradient and drag the mouse. This way allows you to pick up an value and drag it around inside the ramp.

It’s pretty easy so you won’t have to play around for long until you’ve figured out how it works.

34. When you feel familiar with it, try to make the gradient look like mine on the picture below:



35. Above, in the “Coordinates” section, make sure the “W” angle is set to 90 degrees, like in my picture. It’s pink for better conspicuity.



36. Great! Now apply your material to the big sphere in your scene, again by dragging the swatch onto the grid of the sphere in a viewport. But we only want to affect our reflection and nothing else.
37. Close the Material Editor by clicking on the X button in its very upper right.
38. Right click on the sphere in one of the viewports and select “Properties”. What pops up now may seem rather complicated but we only care about the tickboxes in the group “Rendering Control” (“Rendersteuerung”)
39. Untick every tickbox in the group “Rendering Control” except “Renderable” and “Visible to Reflection/Refraction”
40. Click OK – You’re done!
41. Click into your “Perspective” viewport and hit F9 to render your scene – now with proper reflections on your gold material.

Thank you very much!

Addendum A

We will only focus on the adjustments that matter for the output quality of the gold material.

1. Hit F10 to open the “Render Scene” dialog box
2. Click on the tab “Renderer”
3. Now you can see a long list of sections with tags such as “Brazil: General Options”, “Brazil: Render Pass Control”, “Brazil: Image Sampling” and so forth.
4. Click on the Tag “Brazil: Image Sampling” to expand that section. Most important for us are the “Min Samples” and the “Max Samples” values.

These values define how many samples per pixel are calculated during rendering. If it is below 0 then only a fraction will be rendered which results in a very rough but faster output. The min value set the minimum of samples per pixels; the max value defines the maximum of computed samples, e.g. for hard contrasts or edges.

There are three presets already set in Brazil, and accessible via the Buttons “P1”, “P2” and “P3”. The worst image quality offers “P1” with the fastest rendering. The line “Min [-8 x -8] Max [1 x 1]” tells that one rendering sample serves 8 pixels, utmost 1 pixel.

For a better looking preview hit “P2”. Beware that although it looks pretty nice the “Min Samples” value is below 1 and results, especially in animations, in flickering details.

“P3” offers with “Min [2 x 2] Max [4 x 4]” production quality which we want to achieve, but also takes very long to render.

Why more than one sample per pixel I hear you asking. The answer is simple: Quality. The more samples you got for a pixel the closer you can estimate its color. Edges will be very pixelated and either one color, or the other. This is also called “aliasing”. The more samples per pixels you got, the better the renderer can choose in order to make edges smoother (=”Anti-aliasing” or “oversampling”). For a detailed description of anti-aliasing visit this Wikipedia site.

Of course, you can change the min/max values after selecting a preset to your needs. Especially when you’re rendering high quality stills, you might even boost the “P3” settings up to Min [4 x 4] Max [8 x 8].

5. Click “P3” and close the “Brazil: Image Sampling” section via clicking on its label again.
6. Scroll to the section labeled “Brazil: Luma Server” and expand it, yes, by clicking on its label.

In this section everything concerning lighting is controlled, from direct to indirect lighting, caustics, even global illumination (GI) and sub-surface scattering. Don’t worry, we are only interested in a very view settings.<

7. Enable the indirect illumination by ticking the box “Enable” just under “Indirect Illumination”.

Indirect Illumination adds a great deal to a scene’s realism. It simulates the light not only emitted from direct scene lights but also the bounced light from other objects.

Indirect Illumination example: A spotlight on a red wall in a room would result in the whole room being lit by the bounced soft red light from the wall. Without GI you would only see the spotlight on the wall, the other side of the room would be completely unlit. More on Global Illumination on this Wikipedia site.

Of course, indirect illumination slows down the whole rendering, but you can define just like with the Image Sampling Rate how you like to sample the GI.

8. In the group “Global Illumination” you can set the min/max sampling rates for the indirect illumination only. For a fast preview the values “min -4” and “max 0” are okay, but you can expect a little splotchy results, which look like a very compressed JPEG. For a better preview or even production I’d say staying below 0 saves you time, I suggest “min -2” and “max 0”. Everything above 0 is pure luxury but looks stunning.

There’s also a tickbox for locking the sampling rate to the image sampling rate, which is quite practical for previews.

Before rendering your final, you should test a lot the performance with a very small resolution. Don’t waste a lot of time rendering details, nobody will see.

I hope this tutorial was useful to you. If you have anything to add or to comment on just do it – write me a reply below!
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