Pixels or Atoms ?

I started to use Yaf(a)Ray for my current project. The successor of YafRay has came up with many new features, and the new shader system wasn’t the less interesting.

As I stated it as an objective for the project, I wanted to create all my shaders on my own. Here’re the current settings I’m using and how they look like.

Of course they can’t be considered as definitive shaders. But they can be of interest for your own work and experiments, so here they are.

Clay

Clay may look useless, as Yaf(a)Ray offers an option to render a scene in clay, no matter what shaders have been defined (or not)

But how can you render a whole model in clay except the windows ? You can’t with the builtin feature of Yaf(a)Ray. Here comes the need for a clay shader. The main advantage of the settings below is that they are the very same settings used internally by Yaf(a)Ray. So a whole model rendered clay by Yaf(a)Ray and a model using only this shader will look the same.

Car paint, glass, rim alloy : most noticed shaders

The car paint lacks some metallic flakes within it, I will work on it later and post updates here : don’t miss them !

The glass shader is the default setting from Yaf(a)Ray. It just does the job, provided your windows have some thickness (otherwise Yaf(a)Ray can’t compute refraction properly) and you set enough rebounds in the Depth parameter. Especially, you need to increase this setting if you have a window laying behind another one, like I do have in my render.

The rim alloy is a glossy, dark one :

Plastics

Below are a mat plastic and a shiny one. Both are black, but notice I didn’t use #000000 as color : in real world, a black object is never completely black as #000000 is, because it actually does reflect a bit of light.

Rubber

Below are a mat rubber and an attempt for a waxed rubber. Mat rubber perfectly does the job for joints around windows, for example.

The waxed rubber was intended to look like a brand new shiny tire : waxed. This attempt is a failure so far, so I will have to fix this as soon as possible. Stay tuned for updates here.

Chrome

Chrome has never been a complicated shaders : setting a fully reflective shader will work most of time. I didn’t need more complicated solution so far, so here’s a simple shader.