KeyShot Tutorial: Iridescent Materials

hi guys welcome back to another relative Tuesday's this time we are going to take a look at iridescent materials so iridescent materials are materials that change color depending on the view direction so here you can see a cup which I modeled and edit an iridescent material to it and as you can see on this sides this material changes color to a yellow as it goes to the center where the view direction is 90 degrees we have this bright blue color so those materials generally come those materials are naturally found in gemstones so here you can see some examples this would be some crystals where this is a naturally occurring iridescent material and sometimes we also use iridescent to describe colorful steel or titanium finishes but those are usually just colored with an anodized agent or a heat process with stainless steel so those are not usually actually iridescent if they're just really colorful but we can create a actual iridescent material here in heated so as you can see as I move around and the color changes depending on the view angle and also on depending on how much light there is on the material so for example when there is a bright light the blue will shine through and if there's less light you can see the yellow and red coming through so you can do this in two different ways and I'll show you both right now [Music] so we start with a blank slate here in keyshot and the first way to do those iridescent materials is with an actual anodized material so we can go to metal and click on the little plus icon here and go to anodized now we can choose either aluminum or actually titanium which is usually referred to as the rainbow metal so here we can just take one of those Anna dies Titanium's and just apply it to our cup now double click it and open the material graph window and I'll just move that here and in our material graph we can change the film thickness the film of the anodization and this means how long the metal is in the anodization path and the film thickness will describe the color of the material so as you can see you can cycle through from basically white or silver to a bright blue so let's maybe use this gold orange that we had before so now we need a second color so right click on the metal and go to duplicate and add this new metal material to the label input on our surface so this new material is now on top so we can double click this one and change the film thickness so we have let's say a bright blue let's go to maybe 40 so this is now our second color and now what we want to add is a texture color gradient let's rearrange it and double click on it and click see on a keyboard or click on this icon to preview the color gradient and now we want to scroll down and change the gradient type from planar to view direction so this basically means the bright areas of the gradient will be the surfaces that face us and the black areas or the darker areas will be the surfaces that will face away from us so now we can kind of adjust this however we want it so keep in mind that the black areas are where the second material will shine through so we can also change this later but for now this is fine now go out of the preview color and connect the color gradient to the opacity of the second metal here and as you can see we already have the blue shining through and the yellow which is the first metal that we added shining through on the sides now we can adjust this metal material to our liking so here we can double click and maybe even change the film thickness to maybe make it more reddish maybe even orange color and this looks pretty good so as soon as we changed angle of the camera you can see all the surfaces that are facing us will be will be blue and the surfaces that are fake are looking away from us will be yellow and reddish so this is one way to create a iridescent metal material but we also have a second option so double-click the cap again and go to multi material so we don't want to lose our first metal material which we created so in the end I can choose between those and see which one I like more so let's add a new material and the the standard material will be a plastic but let's change this to multi-layer optics so multi-layer optics material is usually made for specific lenses and lenses that you can find in glasses or camera lenses but we will abuse it somehow and create an iridescent materia so to do this I will add a new film so here you can see we can layer different dielectric materials on top of each other and what we are going to do is we just add a few so I will add four new dielectric materials so these are thin films laid on top of each other and we will change the thickness of each of those layers to 100 nanometers so let's change these next we are going to change the color of the whole material to a black and that basically means that this is now non transparent so you don't see through this material so if we if we now move around you can see that this actually is transparent but if we let go and let it render you can see there's no transparency and now the last step is we take our first layer this first one the first dielectric one and change the refractive index from 1.5 which is the standard number to a higher one so here you can see as soon as we go higher with this one the colors will come through so let's go to 3.5 in my case this is our finished iridescent material so now we have two materials which we can switch between and see which one we like more the metal material here has the advantage that I can change the roughness so here I can actually say I don't want it as rough and is if you open the material graph you can change the roughness of the second material also to a lower number so it's a little bit more shiny and the advantage of the multi-layer optics is that it's much more colorful and has a higher contrast so if you end up using one of those techniques feel free to tag me on the image using my instagram handle down below so I can see what you came up with that's it for this week's relative Tuesday's I hope you found it useful and interesting if you did please leave a comment down below like and subscribe for more videos every week thanks for watching and until next time [Music]

Channel: Daniel Brunsteiner

Views: 27,212

Keywords: tutorial, render, 3D, modeling, keyshot, keyshot 8, texture, CG artist, rendering, design, industrial design, product design, visualization, keyshot 9, cgi, photorealism, photoshop, editing, effect, how to, quick tip, iridescent, material, shader, rainbow, color

Id: VbH6NnWzun0

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019