Yafray – Blender 3D metal material setting

I often use Yafray together with Blender 3D for product design rendering. Both programs are free and good open source applications. The 3D rendering of metal objects as shown below was done with Yafray.

yafmetal-rend1.jpg

The followings are the Blender 3D material settings used on these metal pieces. I am no rocket scientist and thus am not fully aware of the effects of all the individual settings and parameters. These settings are experimented and tried from purely trial and error renders. Perhaps there are more than one way to get the same effects.

For Diffuse Shade, Minnaert was used. For Specular Shade, Blinn was used. Spec and Hard value should be set low or to zero. This is because metallic surfaces typically do not exhibit specular highlights.

yafmetal1.jpg

Under the Mirror Trans, the Ray Mirror was turned on. The higher the Raymir value, the more reflective the metal will appear. For a more matt look, the Raymir value should be keep low.

yafmetal2.jpg

For the rendering, a HDR light probe file was also loaded in to give better contrasting reflections. From my experiments, using HDR instead of a normal image map (for environmental mapping) will significantly enhance the realism of the renderings.

3 thoughts on “Yafray – Blender 3D metal material setting

  1. Hey, I can’t figure out how exactly you got the metallic appearance.. I set a sphere to have the exact properties you showed in the images, and when rendered, got an object that looked nothing like the metal objects in your render. Is there something else I needed to add to the model? Textures or something?

  2. Hi,

    Did you use an environmental map? You might have to turn ‘Hori’ on in the ‘map to’ section of the World in order for the map to show up.

    There should be some background elements for the metallic surfaces to reflect… for added realism.

  3. Only images can be created with this effects??? .. If i export the object and i use it, these changes are not there.. how do i get this there ???
    EG: i export to xaml. i see in Visual Studio that these changes r not there..

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