Retro-reflective tape material (cycles)
- April 06, 2014
- 877 Downloads
- 13 Likes
- Blender 2.7x
- Render: Cycles
- Creator: Moony
- License: CC-BY
Description:
This is a cycles material which aims to recreate the retroreflective tape you see on emergency vehicles etc. The first image show the material under diffuse light only - whereas the second image shows what the material looks like with a lamp directly behind the camera.
For neutral colours keep RGB values below 1 (e.g. for white/grey tape RGB = 0.8, 0.8, 0.8) - however if you want flourescent colours boost the RGB values above 1 (e.g. for green RBG = 0.8, 2.0, 0 - Orange = 2.0, 0.5, 0)
Note - this material does not emit light - it uses the "incoming" slot of the Geometry node to reflect light back to its source. To see the retroreflective effect - the light source has to be "on axis" (i.e. on a line drawn between the object and camera).
Note - to get the patterened effect (i.e. the hexes) you'll need to find a suitable tileable texture.
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Charles_Jones
Written November 24, 2025This is great. Thanks for sharing. It really behaves like a retroreflective material so you need a light directly behind the camera for it to work. I'm a Blender noob, so I'll share the challenges I had with this - You have to add your own image into the the texture node (google images - seamless hex texture). I had to change the scale on the mapping node significantly, my x,y,z had to change down from 3 to 0.01 in order to see the texture. It took a while for me to realize as the material just looked plain because the scale of the texture was so tiny that I didn't notice it was there in the viewport.
Nice color, can be very usefull