Procedural Texturing With Weightmaps

Reflection Channel

The final channel that we'll be dealing with is the reflection channel. The scene file that you might have downloaded earlier included a half sphere hidden from the camera to provide a reflection.

Turn on "Trace Shadows" and "Trace Reflections" in the rendering options. The reason shadows are turned on now is because it will plunge the front face of the anvil into darkness (providing you are using my lighting set up) and make some of the reflections easier to see and therefore to adjust.

The main reflection setting is set to 10%, and the texture has a "Turbulence" procedural layer set at 0% with 65% opacity to add detail to the reflective surface, in a similar way to the Turbulence procedural in the specular channel.

Finished Result

All done! We're left with what you hopefully will agree is a fairly realistic looking metal anvil. I hope you've picked up some tips about using the surface editor and gradient layers along the way.

As I mentioned earlier, the major advantage to this technique is that we have the final surface defined in terms of the models weightmaps. We can adjust them in Modeller and immediately see the surface respond to those changes.