How to Create Gold Silver Copper Bronze Material in Blender

How do we realistically render materials for elements such as gold, silver, copper and bronze in Blender? Once you have created one, you will be able to create the others very easily. Ambient lighting must also be good for these objects to look realistic and beautiful. For this, you can provide ambient lighting by using HDR images.

I added a gold bar model to the scene. So, starting with the gold material, I can show you how these materials are made. Objects like gold look much better on smooth surfaces. That’s why we’re going to use the Subdivision Surface Modifier. I click on the Modifier tab and select the Subdivision Surface option.

When we choose this, we will see that the round lines are smoother and let’s increase the levels here, the Subdivision levels. In both the Render part and the Viewport part, we can try these values with numbers as high as four or five. When you increase these values, your computer will slow down as well. Take action with this in mind. I’ll leave it at three.

How to create gold material?

Now we can create our first material. Let’s start with the gold material. First, I switch from Wireframe mode to Solid mode and then click on the material tab.

Let’s create a new material by clicking the New button and change the name of the material to gold. Now we will determine the color of the gold. I click on the color of the base color and here we can choose a color that is close to gold.

However, we can also have a pinpoint gold color by directly entering the HEX code. I’m typing FFC125 here. This is a golden HEX code and I click the Enter button. As you can see, the Base color will have changed. We will not be able to see the golden color on the stage at the moment. Because we need to change View mode to render mode. I change it with the render mode and now we can see the golden color.

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, you can brighten the environment with HDR images, but here I will temporarily use an HDR image from within Blender. If you render, this lighting will not be valid. Only in this Viewport area we will see this this environment image. I click the down arrow and uncheck Scene World.

When I uncheck this option, you will see an HDR image that comes with Blender as an example. I am replacing the Metallic option with a value of 1. When I replace it with 1, we will see that the object on the scene gets a little more golden. The Roughness value is currently too high for the gold material. By doing this 0.2 we can get a more realistic image.

Reflection problem in metal objects

Now we will solve the reflection problem on this gold. Let me first show you what the problem is. I’m copying the gold bar. I rotate it and place it over the gold.

Normally, we should be able to see the reflection of the lower object on this side of the upper object. However, this is currently passive. We need to activate this feature, this reflection feature. We will also do this from Render Properties.

We tick the Screen Space Reflection option. When you check this option, we will be able to see the reflection that should be. Likewise with the object above. will be reflected below. When we open its options, I uncheck Half Res Trace and set the maximum value to 0.2.

Blender uses Eevee as its default rendering engine. You can also convert to Cycles. Both are different, both can give good results. Right now I’m going through Eevee and you will see the option Bloom. I also activate this Bloom option. When I activate this, we can also see the Glow effect on the gold.

We were using the default HDR image that comes in Blender for environmental lighting. When the camera lands on the bright areas of this image, you will see those areas shine. I’m removing it for now, but I wanted to mention that there is such an option when you want to use it.

How to add HDR image in Blender?

As I mentioned before, when you render, you will need to add an HDR image, as you will not get the result here. If you don’t add this, you will get a result like this when you Render. So let’s add our own HDR image.

First I click on World Properties and click on the circle next to Color and select Environment Texture. By clicking the Open button, I access the HDR image on my computer.

If you are not familiar with what HDR visuals are, you may not get the effect of this type of metal properly. In my previous videos, I explained what HDR images are, how they are found and how they are used.

How to create silver material?

Now I will show you how to make silver material. I hide the top object and create a copy of it. By clicking on this icon, I reproduce the gold material. Its name has changed to 001 and I am changing it to silver. Let’s enter the HEX code of the silver color now. I enter the C0C0C0 values here and click the Enter button. When we enter this information, we can see that the object turns silver.

How to create copper material?

I’m copying the silver object. This time I will show you how to make copper material. Let’s reproduce this material and change its name to copper. I change the HEX code of the base color to B87333 this time.

How to create bronze material?

I’m copying the last object again. Let’s copy that material too. Let’s change the name to bronze. Let’s enter the Base Color as the HEX code again. I enter it as CD7F32. Thus, we will get the bronze color as well. I copied over these objects to better understand the reflection on one of the objects and this is how they look. I think they look pretty good.