Metal Shiny help

Hi, i need a bit of texture that will emulate metal, i mean by using a sphere, the ones i use look useless..
anyone got the texture i might be able to use?

How about to add spherical reflection, that would look like highly shiny, polished metal. just check out the teapot demo. Depending on the relfection map it may look like copper when the map is redish, or like steel when it's more kind of a blue tone map.
It's really hard to have a shiny metal map since the shiny FX is a result of diffuse reflections. Of course you can always use a picture of some steel stuff, but it looks strange when in motion.

here's some material, needs some seamless work:
http://www.mayang.com/textures/Manmade/html/Metal/index.html

Another option is cubemapping.

I dont know how useful this may be, but try my code from over

http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=1167


Cubemapping can be very slow depending on the scene, but ive added some speedups to it. The code will run as is and looks extremely shiny-metaly.

You may find this useful. i hope so :D

cube mapping. too slow
unless there is a way to make it hardware?

Well, the way that ones working, it renders 1/6th of the cubemap per frame. its considerably faster than "updatecubemap".... youl find my system quite fast im sure.

"unless there is a way to make it hardware?". the only thing i can think of thatd speed it up more is if we could render to a texture. i thought Cubemapping was hardware- seem as though my current graphics card isnt compatible with it! :P

Use Cube-mapping, render your light sources to a cube-map(Does not need to contain your scene, so rendering speed is blistering), do this for each entity. now you a cubic lightmap for each one.

Use cube map mode 2 and you have nice soft per pixel lighting. use cube map mode 1 and you get a very nice shiny metalic effect.

You simulate differant surface types by using differant light coronas in the cubic light map phase(You create a quad for each light source, texture it with the corona and point it(Or them if there are more than one lights. do them all in one pass) at the entity being updated.

I have this running in cryo and it's very very fast and allows tons of multi-colored(Use entitycolor on the light sources to achieve this) per-pixel soft/shiny lights at once.(Do a seperate pass for soft lights)

O, thanks for sharing Ant :o)