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Hi everybody: I want to add some subtle scratches to my gold and other shiny metal to make it look more realistic but am unsure where to start. Do any of you have any suggestions? Thanks in advance
Cary

you could try it in the roughness channel... take a standard scratchmap, usually black on white.. load it into the roughness slot, invert it so that the scratches are white and turn roughness up.. depending on your needs (subtle around 15).
if you only need the scratches that should be sufficient, if you need "dirt" as well you could use 2 bsdf with weightmapping.

Thanks Polynurb- I will give it a shot early next week. Do you think that I could draw some scratches in pencil on a white piece of paper then scan that in and save as a .bmp? I have never made a scratchmap before but am wondering if this would work. Thanks again for your reply!
Cary

You could take a look at the MXM Gallery, there should be a few materials there which makes effective usage of scratchmaps. Then you can see how other users make use of them and learn from their examples (and mistakes).

But whatever you do when you work with scratches, keep them thin and faint (barely visible) on your surfaces and also if you add bump to them then you wanna keep that value very low, a to high bump value will look silly. Ofcourse this all depends on which surface you're trying to recreate, some may have more intense scratches visible while others have scratches you cannot see that clearly. Study real surfaces and you'll see what and how you're gonna do.

/ Max

Thanks Maximus: I will try to download a few materials with scratchmaps and see how they work. I still think that these are the things that Next Limit should have tutorials detailing the how-to.....oh, in a perfect world !!
Cary