…So Blender has these neat Matcap materials you can use…Shiny, metallic, neat…But I was having trouble getting them to render…Was I missing a step?

But I know that adding textures after adding a material is easy…So I thought I could do it that way…Someone suggested that I go to the Zbrush website download page & there were a bunch of matcap materials there for free…

So I went & I downloaded a few to see how that went…But they were in a strange file format called .ZMT…

So then I spent half an hour? No probably more, just looking for how I could open those .zmt files on my Mac…or convert them…Or was there a plug in for Blender to open zmt files…

Nope…

Then I had a thought…A teeny thought…How hard could it be to just photograph a metallic texture & use that as a texture? Hmm…

Whipped out my little digital camera…Went into the kitchen…Took a photo of the inside of a metal pan…Took a photo of the outside of some steel pots…Took a photo of the inside of a ceramic bowl…

Uploaded them…Stuck each on a cube in Blender…Above is the result of an hour of stupid searching & 5 minutes of creative thought…

Lesson learned: Do it Yourself! (I mean, if I could do that in 5 minutes, imagine the great textures I could create if I actually took a little more time?)

Weird thought of the day: While applying the stainless steel pot texture to a plane & a cube: When I rendered out the image, I saw a face in agony in the plane…Just to the left of the cube? Do you see it? One eye & a giant mouth open, in pain, wih maybe a trail of smoke coming out? It made me wonder…Where did my stainless steel pot come from? What minerals exactly from what country? What animal or creature got caught in the melted metal during casting? or did the mineral in the metal itself have feelings? Did it feel the burning hot when cooking?