How can I create reflective materials like leather in V-ray?
Paul replies Leather is a very common material in both architectural scenes and furniture, as well as clothes for characters. It is therefore very important to get your head around how to create a realisticlooking leather material.
Before we dive into that, however, the first step is to ensure that your object – whether it is a chair or a piece of clothing – is unwrapped correctly. Depending on the complexity of the object, this process could be either really straightforward or mindbogglingly complex! There are plenty of tutorials on the internet that explain unwrapping, so I’d recommend checking those out and you can either use built-in tools such as 3ds Max’s unwrap solution or you can use plug-ins or external standalone solutions.
Moving onto the actual material, first grab a few reference photos, a quick Google search will do. You’ll notice that leather is generally a very reflective material. The reflection colour therefore needs to be set at something like RGB 50,50,50. You’ll see, though, that the reflection is particularly spread out rather than defined. This is due to the micro imperfections found in a material such as leather. These cause the light hitting it to not be reflected at an identical angle as it came in, and instead they reflect randomly as the imperfections dictate.
This effect can be easily achieved in V-ray by adjusting the Reflection Glossiness value. The lower this number is, the more spread out the reflection will be. Test it yourself; let’s go with a value of 0.65 and see what happens. This value is really quite low, so you will need to ensure that either your material sub-divisions can handle it or that your anti-aliaser cleans up any noise for you. Keep testing your values.
Once the reflection is sorted, you’ll want to apply a bump map to show the texture of the leather. Ideally, this would be a greyscale image where black represents the cracks in the leather. There are plenty of places on the internet that give bitmaps like this away for free. Put this in the bump slot and test your render. You may need to adjust the bump percentage to get the exact look you want.