Creating a gold material

"Creating a gold material in 3Ds Max " by Michael Grote

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Chrome is easy, almost 100% reflective. Gold, you would think would be easy, just change the diffuse colour right? wrong. looks like ass if you do that. I’ve been playing about for a while and came up with a pretty nice looking gold material (I’m not trying to say it perfect in any way but its good start)
Here are the material settings I used:
Standard Material set to ‘Multi-Layer’ in the basic parameters rollout.
Diffuse colour set to extremely dark gold/brown colour i.e. i used r25, g19, b5
Diffuse level (the one below the diffuse colour box) = 50
First Specular Level Colour = r255, g215, b129
First Specular Level = 120
First Specular Glossiness = 25
Second Specular Level Colour = white: r255, g255, b255
Second Specular Level = 170
Second Specular Glossiness = 90
Reflection = falloff map
Top Slot (black slot) = raytrace material and value of 30
Bottom Slot (white slot) = raytrace material and value of 90
Falloff Type = fresnel
but after all that its not just the material that makes it look good, you need a good lighting and environment set up. For this render a used hdri lighting/reflections and 3 lighting cards, but thats another tut 🙂
I hope this tutorial was useful for you.
Michael
(c) Michael Grote, www.mgrote.com