Reflective Materials

Reflection Map Example: Cracked Mirror.

The Metal Shader

Metal shader with copperish reflection color. Top: roughness 0.0. Bottom: roughness 0.1, anisotropy: 0.9.

The Metal shader offers one key feature that the Material Shader does not, and that is anisotropic reflection, which essentially means that it lets you bias the way reflections are blurred (to produce the effect of brushed metal). Aside from that, anything the Metal shader can do, the Material shader can do with more work (and control).

Note: Cheetah 3D 8.1.1 also has a PBR shader (Material (PBR) in the Add Material menu) with Metalness, Roughness, Anisotropy, and Clearcoat inputs, which covers much of what this section says needs the Metal or Car Paint shader; see Node Descriptions, not yet covered here.

The Car Paint Shader

The Car Paint shader produces a nice “coated gloss paint” look with very little effort.

The Car Paint shader simulates the behavior of car paint, which is something you can’t do with the Material Shader (at least, not easily). Car Paint is characterized by having a thin transparent coating and metallic properties.