Reflective anisotropic material and stainless steel material

Unity Engine
1

Hi,
I’m an artist and no real experience as far as shaders in unity are concerned. I am still in the process of adjusting my environment in max and there’s two materials which are bugging me and wondering if there exists a way of creating them in unity.

It would be first the reflective anisotropic material as seen on bathroom taps
http://www.bathroom-trends.co.uk/acatalog/Milam-mono-basin-mixer-001.jpg

I suppose there needs to be a cubemap for the reflection part but not so sure about the anisotropic/chrome effect added to it.

And the other would be stainless steel material as seen on handrails
http://www.metalmastersnw.com/files/images/Anthony's%20short%20handrail.jpg

Thanks for your guidance

2

Neither of those materials have anisotropic BRDFs. The bathroom tap is close to perfectly isotropically reflective, and the handrail has a more diffuse (yet still isotropic) reflectance. The anchor points of the rail, however, have a circular grain which does reflect anisotropically.

Unfortunately, realistic reflections (diffuse or mirror-like) are not something that can be done in real time without ray tracing. You’re stuck with cubic environment maps, pre-convolved for diffuse reflectance. This means you won’t have the locally accurate reflections that are obvious in the bathroom tap.

To get the diffuse effect of the railing to look more realistic, you will want to introduce some noise, probably as another texture in UV space.

3

Thanks for the reply,

So to have a broader idea of what I could use, here is my current project: it’s a virtual tour in a studio so the environment is static, there won’t be any extra objects appearing in the reflections than the ones already in the scene and the camera will be fps so no reflection either for the “imaginary viewer”.

I am also using vray to generate the lightmap.

Do you think maybe I could do some render to texture for the taps and handrails based on the vray renders?

Otherwise what is the advantage of a cube map over a render to texture map on the diffuse?

And an extra question, for the cube map in such a scene, should they be done from the vray renders (with the risk of looking a little bit “too good” compared to the rest of the real time scene) or rather a generic render with the lightmap applied?

Thanks