WIP: Old Metal

Poser, Photoshop
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This is just a quickie to show some of the behind the scenes of the work I do.  Old Metal is new to this version of Essential Materials, so both of these versions are before the final release.  I spent a lot of time on each version, and I'm still refining (I just refined my seamless scratch map once again).  The problem with the first version was the gradation between the patina and the metal.  Full patina and full metal were each kind of OK, but they didn't exactly go together and the midrange beween the two was too shiny without being colored by either the metal or the patina.  It ended up looking like the metal just went silvery for no reason.  I think the base problem was my vision.   I added patina to the memory of some nice and shiny but dented, nicked, and worn metal objects I remembered.  The two didn't really go together, which makes sense because the metal items I was thinking of don't have patina.  In the second, I worked entirely from references of metal sculptures with patina.  

I might include some information in the manual (each material gets a page, in addition to an introduction explaining the basic principle behind  using the materials) about how to combine the scratch map with the Metal material to give it a softer, more worn look.  The default is shiny, new chrome metal, but it doesn't take much to get it to look like the one on the left.