Hello Poserites!

I've been wondering how best to recreate a cymbal material in P11 for quite a long old while and I hope someone (BB?! WE LOVE YOU!!!) can help.

So, cymbals are generally made from some kind of bronze, brass, nickel, zinc and copper alloy, with vastly varying percentages of metals for each manufacturer and series of cymbal, but I think there are close to as many different cymbal alloys as there are metals!

Cymbals are also finished in many different ways, or not finished at all. Cymbals that are not finished are known as traditional or 'natural' and they pretty much always look dull and tarnished, but have a dark, dry tone which suits certain styles of music. Cymbals which are finished can be highly polished to an almost mirror finish, show signs of turning (on a lathe) with shallow grooves visible and even have specifically placed dent patterns which have been hammered into them.

For these reasons, I think getting a good cymbal material working would depend on what kind of cymbal we're looking at. As such, because I like everything to be thorough, I'd like to be able to recreate pretty much all of them! Google is pretty much the best place to go for cymbal images, but I'll try to post some examples of what I'm looking for. Oh, and the logos would need to be recreated as well, which presents its own challenge, I think. In real life, these are stamped on using the same technique as is used with many die cast models and such things.

Below are a few examples of the kinds of materials I would like to recreate, if possible. If someone good with materials could help with this, I'd be very grateful. It should be noted that I'm looking for realism above anything else and, as such, sphere maps and the like are best avoided, I think. RT reflections etc are the best option, I'd have thought.

Many thanks.

Zildjian K Custom Special Dry Ride (Natural finish with hammering and turning for the grooves)

Zildjian Z Custom Bottom Hihat (Brilliant finish with light turning for the grooves and extensive hammering)

Zildjian A Custom ride (Brilliant finish with minimal hammering and very light turning, creating a rippled effect... note the laser etched Zildjian logo to the right hand side)

Infinitely more can be found online, there are more cymbal pictures than anything, it seems, lol!

I'm running Win 10 Pro 32GB RAM Intel Core i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

My DA Gallery: glen85.deviantart.com/gallery

Peace, love and polygons!