Old Galvanized Metal V-Ray Material

Let’s take a slightly aged galvanized metal a step further and make an old, worn, slightly rusted version.

The effect we are going for is caused by prolonged exposure to elements. Most likely, there would be some leaking rust from the top edge and some moisture coming up from the ground. Look at the reference photo to get the general idea. The patterns can be different, so find some more photos to see how it can look.

Notice how the resulting patina is not so much red rust, but a sort of dark, dull metallic surface with some rust spots on it.

Approach this by using a VrayBlend material. For the base coat, we will slightly modify our aged galvanized metal materialand for the coat, we will create a rusty metal material.

Start by adjusting the base mat. Make a different Diffuse map, one that looks more worn and has some strong Ambient Occlusion pass added. (Check the PSD file for details.) The rest of the settings and maps stay the same.

Make another material for the rusty areas. For Diffuse, create weak, blurry reflections (glossiness 0.54) and a Bump texture, made by modifying the Diffuse map. Check the PSD file for details. Fresnel IOR for a material like this is set at 3.0.

This is a very basic material, so you can improvise with it a bit; make it more orange, more rough, or modify it in any other way. The exact details are not as important as long as it gives the impression of dark, aged metal.

Time to blend these two materials together! To do this, paint a custom mask (for this example, we created a quick one using Mari, but you can do it in any software you prefer).

Below is the mask we will use for this example. We added some leaky looking patterns to the areas where they are most likely to occur. Obviously, no two buckets will rust in the same way, so feel free to make a different looking mask (just try to keep some reference photos close by so you can keep it looking realistic).

Make a VRayBlendMtl with the modified galvanized metal as base layer and the rusty metal as Coat layer. Use the b&w mask as the Blend Amount map to achieve the final render.