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It's kind of interesting that no materials have metalness between 0 and 1. It might as well be a boolean or a tag. I know it doesn't physically make sense to h
by CapsAdmin 4y ago
It's kind of interesting that no materials have metalness between 0 and 1. It might as well be a boolean or a tag.
I know it doesn't physically make sense to have it in between, but then I wonder why that ability is even included in a system that supposedly should help you make physically correct materials.
Maybe metalness of 0.5 could be used to describe a fine mixture of 50% metal and 50% non metal?
Maybe it's needed to provide an alias of sort when transitioning between a metal and a non metal in a texture
- jessermeyer 4y agoBlending between materials of various roughness, e.g, rust / paint peeling, etc.
- ummonk 4y agoI assume it's more about when you don't have the level of microscopic detail required to model the texture of a material so you just average it out. E.g. brushed steel is built from a material that has a metalness of 1, but in practice for most rendering you'll just represent the brushed microstructure using a metalness value somewhere between 0 and 1.
- dxuh 4y agoThe main reason is having metals and non-metals in the same texture and you want the blending to look nice. Also consider cases where the material properties change with a higher frequency than the texture resolution can capture (e.g. metal-dust on a dielectric). If you don't blend this in the texture it might produce aliasing. There are also cases where you might want to use a non-binary metalness for dusty metals or rusty metals or painted metals and stuff like that. Metalness is essentially F0, the base reflectivity of a material (looking straight at it), which can be high for materials with very high indices of refraction, like Diamonds and other gemstones. Afaik Diamond has a metalness of about 0.2.