Chrome V-Ray Material

Like most metals, chrome is highly reflective and its appearance is determined almost strictly by its reflections. The Diffuse component in this shader needs to be very dark. This means that we can start by setting the Diffuse color of our VrayMtl to almost black (1;1;1) and the Reflect color to a high value like (230;230;230).

All materials exhibit some degree of Fresnel falloff in their reflections. For very reflective materials, like metals, the Fresnel IOR values of 20~100 work best. Since this chrome is very reflective, set the Fresnel IOR to 100 and you should have something like the smooth, reflective, mirror-like surface here:

While this already looks pretty good, it still looks a bit fake, since nothing in the real world is this perfect. Every surface has some unevenness to it and nothing is so perfectly polished that the reflections are this sharp. These little details can help a lot in making the shader more believable.

Start by lowering the Reflection Glossiness to 0.98 and see if that looks better. Notice how the reflections now have a tiny bit of blur to them– not too much, though, since the chrome still needs some mirror-like reflections in order to look believable.

Now let’s add some Noise to the Bump slot, to make the surface slightly uneven. In this example, we will use a Bump value of 3, so the effect is very subtle.

Here are our sample Noise map settings. The Noise Size might need some adjustment, depending on the size of the object.

Here is the end result.

This is a good method for creating a realistic, clean, polished Chrome material without using any bitmaps or complicated techniques.

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