Wet rocks

[Terri Brown]

Hi guys,

 

I'm back with a shader question...learning as always

 

Here's a WIP image I'm doing for a beachfront project.

 

What I need is advice on is the shader/s i'm using for the wet rocks in the foreground. There are many things i want to change, but the one thing i'm struggling with is to get a reflective 'wet' look on the underside of the rocks that is darker than my originally dark rock. I have 4 different shaders for the wet rocks, but in general it's a blend material with the wet rock vray mat masked over the dry rock vray mat. Pretty basic stuff. Following reference images and betrand's post http: //www.ronenbekerman.com/making-of-3d-render-gh-house-bertrand-benoit/, my 'wet' material is glossier and more reflective than the dry one. HOWEVER, I also want it to be DARKER, which is tough when it is reflecting the beach and sky which are so bright! here are some references and one of my wet rock shaders:

 

The rocks in the sea i will change to be completely wet like the one reference.

 

How do i have a highly reflective DARKER look? Do i bring the refraction up?

 

Using 3Ds Max and Vray 2

 

Thanks in advance for the tips...

Terri

[RyderSK]

How does you gradient map look like ? To me it looks like the problem of your wet reflection is rather missing fallof, seems to be almost mirror-like. I would suggest checking IOR to 1.6 or playing with fallof curve if you're into tweaking things.

[Terri Brown]

here's a closeup of the gradient ramp i plugged into the wet rock reflection channel, and the mask that defines where the wet area is.

 

I'm sure i can do without the gradient ramp - i plugged it in because i wanted to experiment with some variation in reflection.

 

My IOR is already set to 1.6...but i just noticed that fresnel was off - do u think that was the issue?

[Chris MacDonald]

For the IOR to work you need to have fresnel reflections ticked.