Hi there,
First port here, hopefully you can help me. I'm Industrial Designer so Keyshot is a secondary skill to me, therefore I'm still very much learning and appreciate your patience.
I am looking for a dark tone material with an iridescent coating but also a highly reflective look. The tricky part is that I need to be able to control the color spectrum of the iridescent effect.
First thing I tried, favoring color spectrum control over dynamic effect, was a metal material with a gradient color texture. It does an ok job a some specific views, but obviously doesn't display any dynamic effect and doesn't work too well with complex geometry.
Then, after looking for some help on this forum, I ran into multiple "pearl material" solutions that I thought would help, especially this one from Bdesign:
https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=24072.msg100950#msg100950 (https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=24072.msg100950#msg100950)
Unfortunately, the control of the color spectrum is not that good and I have been having a hard time creating high contrast reflection.
Finally, I found that post from Didi, but it's very old and I doubt I will get any answer from the creator:
https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=20000.0 (https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=20000.0)
But the material achieved on the last version, UKUK, seems very promising to me.
I am a bit stuck in my research now, so hopefully one or some of you would have advice for me.
Thanks,
Clem
I would play around with the Metallic Paint shader, and change the color of the clear coat + mess with the settings for Clear coat IOR and thickness, this usually gets you some cool effects similar to what you just attached.
Here's a quick demo I did. You can see when you play with it yourself, there's lots of variation possible. CC Thickness really has a strong effect, so play with that a lot as well until you start to understand the differences it makes.
Thanks DMerz, I gave another try to the metallic paint, but even though it technically gives more control, I found it harder to get the color transition I want.
However, I think I figured it out using the Thin Film + Metal Backside material, "Pearl" method (see pic 1).
My issue is that I wasn't able to get a bright reflection at first, but then by increasing the index all the way up to 2.5 and dialing my thickness back to a proper color spectrum it started to work.
Adding a color layer on top of it, here a gradient, also helped me forcing an effect on a dedicated spot.
I am still having issue with that spot gradient on the edge, it's not smooth enough of a transition I feel (see pic 2).
Any tips?
Next steps are trying different tones and improving the environment.
Nice! looking really promising and thanks for sharing your results after working through it.
As for the gradient, I don't have any advice there, unfortunately. In the past I have made gradients in photoshop that were 16-bit or 32-bit for specific cases (such as light falloff maps) but not sure if that helps you in this case.
I've been trying to achieve an iridescent metallic paint look as well. Would you mind sharing the material so that I might experiment with what you have? Of course, I'd also share any meaningful adjustments I make.