Hey material experts! I would love a really good open metal mesh, something appropriate for an automotive grille. My material skills are just not sufficient to do this right, and modeling something like that will destroy my file size. I've been working to get my model down below 1 GB as is.
Thanks!
What style of metal mesh are you after? A reference picture perhaps.
There's a circular mesh material in the material library, have a look at this to see how its done. When you've got your grille or mesh pattern make sure you save it with an alpha channel which will give you transparency where you want to be able to see through the mesh.
Here's an example file with a circular mesh applied.
(http://www.keyshot.com/images/JeffM/mesh.jpg)
http://www.keyshot.com/images/JeffM/MeshSample.zip (http://www.keyshot.com/images/JeffM/MeshSample.zip)
I actually figured it out after a little time watching the material tutorials here on the site.
(http://i453.photobucket.com/albums/qq252/tomvanryn/DaggerWithRoofUpdated334.jpg)