Incandescent Metal Material - Arnold for Houdini

This simple tutorial demonstrates how to create an incandescent metal material. It uses a variety of shaders such as Facing Ratio, Range, Multiply and Cell Noise connected to the Emission Color of the Standard Surface shader. Thanks to Slava Sych for the assistance with this tutorial.

The shader used in this tutorial can be found here.

Standard Surface

Create a Standard Surface shader and assign to your model.

Increase Metalness to 1

Cell Noise

Create a Cell Noise shader (Cell Noise1) and change the following parameters:

Pattern: Worley2
Additive: Enabled
Octaves: 4
Lacunarity: 1.76
Amplitude: 0.72
Scale XYZ: 25 25 25 (remember that Scale values depend on the size of your model).

Range shader (range3)

Create a Range shader and connect it to the Base Weight of the Standard Surface shader. Connect the Cell Noise shader to the Input of range3. Change the following parameters:

Input Min: 0.249
Output Min: 0.3
Output Max: 0.7
Smoothstep: Enabled

Range shader (range2)

Create another Range shader and change the following parameters:

Input Min: 0.3
Input Max: 0.7
Output Min: 0.1
Smoothstep: Enabled

Bump2D

Create a Bump2D shader and change the Bump Height to 0.02. Connect the Range shader (range2) to Bump Map in the Bump2d shader, and connect the Bump2d shader to Normal of the Standard Surface shader.

Facing Ratio

Create a Facing Ratio shader and change the following parameters:

Bias: 0.6
Gain: 0.48
Linear: Enabled
Invert: Enabled

Color Correct

Create a Color Correct shader. Change the input color RGBA to: 2.9642 0.5212 0 1

Connect the Facing Ratio shader and Color Correct shaders to a Multiply shader (multiply1).

Range Shader (range4)

Create another Range shader and change the following parameters:

Input Min: 0.249
Input Max: 0.484
Output Min: 0.7
Output Max: 1
Enable Smoothstep
Connect the Cell Noise shader (cell_noise1) to the Input of the Range shader (range4).
Create a Multiply shader (multiply2). Connect multiply1 to the Input 1 of multiply2.
Connect the Range shader (range4) to Input2 of multiply2.

Range shader (range 1)

Create a Range shader.

Change the Output Max to 3.
Connect the Multiply shader (multiply2) to the Input of Range shader (range1). This is required for the higher value color intensity values.
Connect the Range shader (range1) to the Emission Color of the Standard Surface shader.

Now it is possible to control the incandescence using the Emission Weight (0 to 1). If you require more intensity, increase the Output Max value in Range shader (range1).

_{Final shading network}