Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> > One spontaneous thought: Too much ambient on the sphere (makes it look somewhat
> > "dusty"); in fact, a chrome sphere should have zero ambient.
> >
> >
> Just take a look at "metals.inc" and "golds.inc". Those "standard" metallic
> textures all have a LOT of ambient. Way to much in my point of view.

Those standard textures are *crap*, honestly. They seem to date back to ages
when realistic lighting models were still light years away. So they added
ambient where you would now want to use radiosity, colored reflections instead
of metallic ones, and more such kludges that may have been needed back then,
but just get in the way now.

You know how to do a good gold material these days?

Turn on radiosity, set up an HDRI sky sphere, choose a nice rich yellow color,
metallic reflection, some micronormals blur for highlights, and voila - you're
there. Five minutes flat if you're familiar with it.

In a conventional lighting environment, it takes you ages (well, at least it
does to me) to come up with something that *remotely* looks like some gold-ish
metal. Even if you start with the stuff from "golds.inc".

Well, I'll not complain though: Given how easy it is to make good metal textures
these days, who needs metals.inc or golds.inc anyway? They're not eating up too
much hard disk space, so I'll just leave them there ;)

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