it is always an issue when your rendered image looks far too clean to be ‘accepted’ by a human mind, it always looks ‘just not right’. so let’s add a tiny bit of dirt to everything with the new vray dirt shader to please the human desire for an unclean, natural looking ‘patina’:
first of all create a simple cube. size 60, 60, 60. 1 segment on length, width and height. now let’s go the the material editor and select a material slot. it’s recommended to preview the material slot as a cube, not with the standard sphere since our object is in fact a cube.
since we are using the vray renderer for this example take the vraymtl as the base material, go to the diffuse channel, click ‘none’ and put a vraydirt here. now open up this the vraydirt parameters and put for example a clean galvanic plate material in the unoccluded channel (it’s a default material in the maps folder of a standard 3ds max installation, maps/metal/galvplat.jpg). click on the occluded channel and select and old metal (oldmetal.jpg).
radius 20, subdivs 16 and hit render. as you may notice, all the edges or slightly covered with the second material. this is an easy way to add dirty edges to just everything. lovely.