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I am working on a smartphone render, on Blender 2.79 with Cycles, using mainly the new Principled shader. Everything is working perfectly, I am not new to 3D nor Blender, but there's a very specific surface that has proven difficult.

The back cover of the phone is made of some sort of glass (tempered glass) on top of a plastic surface (as I have come to guess, I might be wrong); and the mix gives a very particular kind of reflections.

enter image description here

I have managed to get close by combining Anisotropy and Clearcoat, but the result is still not satisfying. I'm even thinking about working without the Anisotropic reflections at all.

Here's a link to some pics of the real phone and some screens of what I have done so far.

enter image description here enter image description here

I hope someone can help me with this.

Thank you

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  • $\begingroup$ You need to make AO map for that kind of reflection $\endgroup$
    – Nuhan
    Oct 18 '18 at 10:05
  • $\begingroup$ Hello Nuhan, AO like Ambient Occlusion? $\endgroup$
    – user63160
    Oct 18 '18 at 10:06
  • $\begingroup$ yes Ambient Occlusion map or roughness map. $\endgroup$
    – Nuhan
    Oct 18 '18 at 10:08
  • $\begingroup$ What's the image texture that you are using for mixing the two shaders? $\endgroup$
    – Nicola Sap
    Oct 18 '18 at 10:37
  • $\begingroup$ That one is for the little patch on top of the cameras. There's a little rectangle zone where the material reflections stretch horizontally instead of vertically, so I made two different shaders and mixed them with a texture. The only thing that changes between them is basically the roughness and the anisotropy. I'll upload a couple of pics to help $\endgroup$
    – user63160
    Oct 18 '18 at 10:41
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This is really just a supplement to Nicola's answer: my approach was to control the Anisotropic Rotation with a grad something like this:

enter image description heresimple

And a simple, dark, slightly blue-tinted glossy material, (roughness around 0.1).

resulting in this kind of response to peak light-sources in an HDR environment.

enter image description here

These are the nodes: I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area to justify them - I've a feeling changing Anisotropic Rotation is equivalent to rotating tangent space, bar some mapping, but how it's done in the Principled shader is something I have to look up.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ It looks very close! Could you please show me your nodes? $\endgroup$
    – user63160
    Oct 18 '18 at 15:12
  • $\begingroup$ @Aotuhm.. done. The HDR lighting is a interior with some point ceiling lights, like your the ones on your photo. $\endgroup$
    – Robin Betts
    Oct 18 '18 at 15:53
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you! This is very close, and I like the look. $\endgroup$
    – user63160
    Oct 18 '18 at 16:09
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It looks like you need to add some "waves" to the direction of your reflections.

So probably you should intervene on the Normals of your model or, more easily, your shader. Actually, since it's the Anisotropic reflections we need to tweak, then the Tangent socket is more adequate (it will basically only affect the anisotropy).

This is an unorthodox use of the Normal Map node but it helps somehow:

enter image description here

enter image description here

Note: my box is already a bit wawy before playing with the normals, because it has some non planar geometry near the middle due to poor topology used for a hole: this already helps on its own:

enter image description here

Probably there's something better than just a random noise applied to the Tangents, but I think that's the socket you should focus on to do the trick.

(add your own hdri)

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you very much! I'll follow this approach. Yes, the non planar geometry helps in this kind of situations (radial reflections), I've seen it in the fingerprint scanner of some phones. And your use of blue lights, I didn't think about it. Thanks again $\endgroup$
    – user63160
    Oct 18 '18 at 11:32

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