How to Create a Metal Material

This guide shows you how to set up a material so that it renders a metal.

Overview

V-Ray provides a Metalness parameter, which creates metallic reflections. That is the main ingredient when making a metal material.

Download the scene to follow along

This scene is made with V-Ray 7 hotfix 2, on Blender 4.3.

Steps

1 Initial Setup

First, let's choose the camera that focuses on the shower. Go to the Outliner and find the Cameras collection. There you will find the Metal_Camera. Click on the green Camera icon next to its name ( ) to set it as the render camera. You should also see the mirror come into focus in the viewport. The camera has its properties preset for the scene. You can explore its settings from the Camera Properties (Data Properties when selecting a different object).

Then, select the Shower geometry from the viewport. Set the bottom editor to the V-Ray Node Editor. Then, make sure the editor is adjusted to the Shader Node Tree. You can now see the Chrome_Mtl in the editor.

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2 Material Properties

In the V-Ray Node Editor, set the following properties:

• Diffuse = HSV (0.0, 0.0, 0.46)
• Reflection Color = HSV (0.0, 0.0, 1.0)
• Glossiness = 0.95
• Metalness = 1.0
• Disable Lock Fresnel IOR
• Fresnel IOR = 16.0

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3 Final Render

Those are all the needed settings! You can render the scene and see the final result.

The render settings are preset; you can view them in the Render Properties tab. The Image Sampler is one of the most crucial factors for the noise and quality of any render, so if anything, check its settings.

You can start a production render from the Render button at the top of the Settings.

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Here is the final render. Some post-effects are applied; you can set your settings and effects from the Layers tab of the VFB.

You can now apply these settings to any material, and it will render a material with metallic reflections.