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I spend way to many hours on trying to find a working node setup for my plastic material. I tried using PBRs, suggested node setups from Stack Exchange for Blender 2.7 and less, but nothing really worked. Can anybody suggest some tips for tweaking?

Subject: Optical fiber connector (MTP)

Problem: Realistic rough plastic material

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ hello, you should add images instead of making your question rely on downloading a file to understand your problem clearly. If you must upload a file, please use Blend-Exchange to do so. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Timaroberts ♦
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 16:29
  • $\begingroup$ Hello :). Cheap rough plastic can be achieved using a very dense Noise texture and the Bump node. I use it all the time, and it works rather well. $\endgroup$
    – jachym michal
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 19:50
  • $\begingroup$ One thing I see in your file is that you have a Bump Node connected to the Displacement output. Connect it to the "Normal" input of the BSDF instead, or use a Displacement Node (Bump works best for EEVEE) $\endgroup$
    – Christopher Bennett
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 21:54

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You could try a setup like this. Some things to note - First, as you can see from the graph, Bump Nodes facilitate Normal inputs, and Displacement Nodes are used for Displacement. Displacement doesn't have quite the effect in EEVEE as it does in cycles, but it still does has some effect (especially with Ambient Occlusion turned on).

Plastics

On the topic of Normals, the contrast of generated textures (Such as a Noise Texture), is far too high to be able to plug directly into a Bump Map at full strength and still have it look "natural". As you can see in the graph, I mixed the result of a Noise Texture .996% with pure white. and I still had to reduce the strength of both the Bump Node and the Displacement, otherwise it still looked too strong.

Although I know it breaks the rule of Metallics/Dialectrics, I found the materials benefited from a slight increase in the metallic values, to work in conjunction with the roughness to make the reflections (or sheen) look a bit more realistic given your lighting setup.

Lastly, as you can see, I mixed some Ambient Occlusion "shadows" with the base color, which allows for some extra perception of detail while keeping the Normal Strength on the subtle side.

To save you the trouble of setting up all the nodes again (as I have already done it), I will post your .blend with my modifications, so you can see the results without too much effort, and can then decide whether something like this works for you.

File is here -

As a final note - I know the example I used is in EEVEE, but it works just as well in Cycles.

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  • $\begingroup$ Legendary answer. Thx a lot! $\endgroup$
    – tom
    Commented Aug 22, 2020 at 8:13
  • $\begingroup$ Is there a reason though why i can´t render it (Cycles)? The only way i can see it is with CPU Compute instead of GPU. $\endgroup$
    – tom
    Commented Aug 22, 2020 at 8:47
  • $\begingroup$ I wish I could help with that one, but I have no idea what could be causing that. $\endgroup$
    – Christopher Bennett
    Commented Aug 22, 2020 at 8:52
  • $\begingroup$ Thx anyway!! :D $\endgroup$
    – tom
    Commented Aug 22, 2020 at 8:53
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    $\begingroup$ For all other people with this problem: If you try to render in cycles, and at the top of the render window is a text "optix implementation does not support shader ray tracing yet", go to preferences and go back to CUDA rendering instead of OptiX. $\endgroup$
    – tom
    Commented Aug 22, 2020 at 9:00

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