Create the Matte Metal by Philipk

In this tutorial I will describe my workflow for a pretty typical metal plate wall (that is a bit sci-fi). I will use 3ds Max and Photoshop to create this material.

The metal type will be a pretty matte metal surface with some weathering and paint applied, you can apply a cube map reflection on such materials but I strongly recommend to use one with very blurred details or even better, if your engine supports it, use one of the lower mipsteps in one with crisp details. 

3D Process

Start with a simple plane, the first thing I want to do is to create a very basic shape using some bevels.



Here is the basic shape, you can see I mostly used about 45 degree angles at most. And I usually model the whole base without any smoothing groups to see the shape clearly. Try to stay away from using too big angled shapes as this will really give away that there actually is no geometry there but a flat surface.



A tip is to not model things too deep when projecting to a flat surface. A normal map works best with smaller details and angles at 45 degrees or less (of course you sometimes want to use more than 45 degrees, this is just a good basic rule in general).



Now the angles are all really sharp due to everything being just simple angles without any chamfered edges and no smooth shading. So what you want to do now is to start adding "support edges". These are edges laying close to your angle edge, one on each side of the angle.

You may not want to have any smooth transitions on concave angles, so in those cases you can put the faces in different smoothing groups (use hard edges in Maya). I still recommend to use one single smoothing group (only soft edges in Maya) on your whole object and vary the suport edges distance to get harder or softer edges.



This is the result after all support edges are done and the whole object use one smoothing group.