Is there a reliable book or website that says, for a specific type of material, how much roughness, anisotropy, fresnel, color, transparency and etc that a material has? For instance, what if I had aluminum versus silicon? How would I know what attributes to give different shaders in blender?
Hi Sid,
Most of the attributes you mention are not dependent on the material. There are websites that list the IOR of different materials though, for instance:
https://pixelandpoly.com/ior.html
and more scientific and complete:
But the 'best' and most common way, is to use your eyes and try to reproduce what you see (although using the listed IOR's as a starting point might help).
They only have a few materials, but it might help. Just make sure to change engine to Blender.
Yeah as Martin said, in the end it's more about the eye than anything else. I remember a lesson from Bartek Skorupa where he plugged in dozens of nodes and math nodes and IOR values to get real life gold down to the scientific level, spent a lot of time on it, only to have it look as good as what you get with two or three nodes. He concluded it was a waste of time to approach shading and materials that way and advised everyone to not overcomplicate. Of course there is no right or wrong here, only preference.