question about adding color to the glossy bsdf

[dedd26]

hi, wouldn’t adding some color to the glossy bsdf make the material seem more metallic? i am an absolute noob to materials, and i remember hearing about how changing the color of the glossy bsdf would make the material seem more metallic. the reason why im asking is because you changed the color of the glossy bsdf for the tire example.

[Jonathan Lampel]

Hi, good question! We’ll talk about this much more later on in the course, so ask again then if you still have questions about it, but in short:

Coloring the Glossy BSDF does indeed make it look metallic, but the confusion here is is because the word ‘coloring’ is too vague. To be more specific:

– Metals can have tinted glossy reflections

– Non-metals only have greyscale glossy reflections

Lowering the value of the glossy (decreasing how much light is being reflected) doesn’t necessarily make it look metallic because the color is still greyscale, but increasing the saturation (increasing the variation of which colors of light are reflected) definitely would. 

Hope that helps!

[spikeyxxx]

He didn’t change the ‘color’ (saturation stays 0), only the ‘value’ (made it darker). But I must admit that I also ddn’t know that you could do that with non-metals 😉

[dedd26]

oh ok! thanks for the quick reply.

[dedd26]

thanks for the info, i appreciate it!

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