HOW can I make a Hot Burning metal effect WITH textures?
Jean-philippe Ramessian, UK
There are multiple ways to make a burning metal effect, and here I’ll be showing you how to create this using V-ray. As you can see in the image above, I’ve used my personal logo and made a hot metal effect similar to all the promotional material for Batman: Arkham Knight. When iron is at its hottest, it actually glows bright yellow – so bright it’s almost white – and when it gets a bit cooler it goes red, so basically you’ve got a transition from bright desaturated yellow to a dark red. You can achieve this by using a ramp texture or something similar to the falloff texture that 3ds Max offers; it gets you from the bright yellow outer part of your model to a dark red bit inside. V-ray Blend Material is the best material to do this with. Essentially, you make a material that serves as the base metal and then add the scratches, as well as the hot glow. I put scratches on the model’s textures to add some realism. Choose whatever approach you like to add some rough details.
After you’ve made the base metal material, you can make a new V-ray material for the scratches and use the same scratches as an alpha for the second coat, which is a V-ray light material with a falloff set from yellow to red. This gives beautiful results. I used a texture for the diffuse colour slot, too, as I prefer a more texture-based approach. Don’t try to get it perfect because sometimes to get perfection in the glow you’ll have to add light intensity to it, which tends to mess with things. Too much light might damage your scene and will change the overall look, so be careful not to overdo it.