Chrome material

Hi.

I'm trying to make a chrome/reflective style material like this image of a solar heater.
(because I'm trying to virtualize a solar heater for an online shop)


I'm new using materials and nodes so i'm struggling with that… In the package Blend4Web CE are files with examples about that material (like the sink demo) but there's a lot of images inside and nodes that I don't really know where they come from .

If someone has a tutorial about materials like that I will be pleased. Or maybe not a tutorial but if someone could just tell me what I need, to do a material like that, like steps (It doesn't matter if I have to research more) or something like that just to guide me in the right direction because I don't even know how to start.

I hope someone can understand me because english is not my native language.

Hello Alberto,

If you are famlliar with Blender, try this :
1-First of all, create an env map and save the file as a .jpg :

For this , you need a cube, an empty and a sphere.
The empty must be located at the origin af the sphere. ( in the center of the sphere )
And the cube whereever you want, but not in the sphere.
On the sphere, assign a shadeless material with a white and black panoramic (image or movie ) texture and "generated" coordinate set to "sphere".
On the cube, assign another shadeless material with an environnment map texture and choose the empty as source of the envmap.Projection set to "cube"
Hit F12, and when the rendering is done, your envmap texture is done too. Save it as a .jpg texture.
It should be a rectangular image ( 3:2) with two rows of three squares on which your first panoramic picture is mapped in another way.

2- Then assign the material to your object :

Open your .blend with the object which will receive the chrome material.
Assign a new material, with a more or less dark grey diffuse, set specularity with high value and hardness around 100 ( cook torr is perfect )
Assign a texture with environnment map (source set to image file ). Choose your envmap.jpg done previously,
set coordinate to "generated", and "cube" or "sphere" according to the shape of your object.

Influence : no color, but toggle mirror and set it to a value between 0.2 and 0.7.

You won't see the result in blender viewport, but you hit "fast preview" in the render tab and it'll open your browser and show you this result. You' ll probably need to adjust some of the parameters in the material tab and in the texture's influence tab ( mix, or overlay, or … )

Hope this will help.

I knew there was a easy way for that. It was tricky at the beginning

Solar heater.html

There is the result but if you check it when you move in the scene you can kind of see the image along the cylinder (I subdivided the object and in the transform tools I used smooth) and if you get close enough you can actually see what kind of image I used.

I guess I have to "play" with the parameters in the material as you said in order to avoid that. Or can it be the image? maybe the colors, lightning or something like that? Maybe I need nodes for that?

Actually this helped me, so thanks a lot Nicolas I will try with another images to see if something changes

Chrome does really reflect what is around.

Just have a look in real life at your face in a spoon for example

The cylindric part of your heater gives a good reflection effect, and you'd want not to be able to distinguish the reflect on the sides.

For that, you could blur your source image. Around 20 to 50 % maybe.

I'll do that thanks a lot, the help is appreciated