How to do matte stainless steel?

[johnnyc]

Hi everyone,

I am new here. I am currently doing some product/furniture renderings under max light tracer (for the natural lighting). Some of the component have those matte (low reflective) /and thin hairline-textured aluminum look. However, I found it hard to do such texture rendered under light tracer. I tried to follow the tutorials on the internet but the result was not convincing and flat, I tried the various settings in raytrace material and also different settings in the falloff map, multiresolution antialiaser and bump map and the result was no good, I've been doing this for a week and it's very frustrating! Am I missing something? Could anyone please help me on how to do this under max light tracer?

 

Thanks,

Johnny.

[smoke3dstudio]

Create and place a new (standard) light at the position that you want the specular to appear on the metal surface and exclude other object that you don't want any faked high light appearing on.

 

 

You can use this technique in any of standard scene as well, when there is no specular on the metal.

[johnnyc]

Thanks Smoke,

 

ok my renderings are like that, each rendering will have one furniture on a light gray floor with no wall/surrounding (that's what the client wants), some components like round supporting posts of tables will be in matte aluminum (they don't want any shiny chrome metal), I think the problem is when I used raytrace material it has no things to reflect on and it turned out all white and dull in light tracer mode. When i put something on surrounding (with exclude from camera) the raytrace object became so weird and fake...all I want is an aluminum finish with very low/and blurry reflection...

 

I think these problems only appear in light tracer mode (I use one daylight) and not in standard lighting. I don't know why and these had given me so much headaches for past week...

 

Also, when I put some hairline texture on the bump map and turn on all antialiase parameters (in both material and rendering panels) why is the hairline textures still appear as jagged lines...?

 

Do you have any more suggestion for the above problems?

 

Anyway I will try your method and see how it goes, thanks for your help.