Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Every Material Known to Man/Gold

Gold 1

One of the gold formulas.

Alpha: 1.0
Color: R=1.0 G=0.836 B=0.386
Reflectivity: 1.0
Specularity: 0.75
Hardness: 180
Translucency: 0.50
Ambient: 0.50
Emit: 0.300
Raytracing
Ray Mirror: 0.20
Depth: 2
Fresnel: 0.5
Fac(tor): 2.20

Gold 2

After several hours of experimenting, a beginner alchemist created this better alternative formula:

Material
Col: R=1.00 G=0.88 B=0.25
Spe: R=1.00 G=1.00 B=1.00
Mir: R=1.00 G=0.88 B=0.25

A: 1.0

Mirror Transp
Ray Mirror: On
RayMir: 0.50

Shaders
[Lambert] Ref: 1.0

[Phong] Spec: 2.0
Hard: 75

Amb: 0.043

Make sure you have "Ray" enabled (Scene (F10) > "Render" box > Ray) or else it won't reflect light.

Looks good with a Sun lamp as a light source

Gold 3

Gold 3 was mentioned as looking more like "Polished Brass" and was moved to the "Brass" Section.

Gold 4

This is also kind of like brass, somewhat old and worn. To tweak it more you could add a brownish color or make the specularity more reddish.

"Material" tab
Color: R 1, G .954, B .392

"Shaders" tab
Reflectivity (Lambert): .843
Specularity (Blinn): .5
Hardness(Blinn): 16
Refr (I think this value is "refraction") (Blinn): 5.575
Translucency: .26
Ambience: .183
Emit .072

"Mirror Transp"' Options:
Raymir: enabled, .07

"Map To" tab
Nor: enabled, .50

"Texture" Window
Texture Type: Clouds

"Color" tab
Right Side Color: R .915, G .876, B .394
Left Side Color: Black
Left Side Alpha: 0

By left/rightside I mean the colors and alpha located on these two parts of the nodes window. Image shown here:

Gold 5

Based on material "Gold 3" with some tweaks to be done to make this material look more goldish. Base setup is taken from the release Notes ([1]).

You should to take this material as a base and study thoroughly how textures are set up, because without them it loses 50 percent of its convincing look.

Material
Col: R=0.912 G=0.782 B=0.082
Spe: R=1.00 G=0.913 B=0.8
Mir: R=0.857 G=0.90 B=0.70

A: 1.0

Mirror Transp
Ray Mirror: On
RayMir: 0.40

Blender 3D rendering of gold ingots using the Gold 5 method.

Shaders
Diffuse Shader:
[Oren Nayar] Ref: 0.8
Rough: 0.9
Specular Shader:
[Phong] Spec: 1.4
Hard: 20

From those structure textures (voronoi) I suggest to suppress normal-mapped to the range 0.1-0.3.

Gold 6
This is a nice gold material I found online.

Material
Diffuse Color: Red=.286; Green=.263; Blue=.136
Specular Color: Red=1; Green=.96; Blue=.656
Mirror Color: Red=.751; Green=.664; Blue=.289
Alpha: 1

Mirror/Transparency
Ray Mirror is on and is set to 1.00.

Shaders
Diffuse (Lambert): .54
Specular (CookTorr): 1.86
Specular Hardness is 356.

Gold 7

Using Blender 2.62 and the Cycles Render, I built this image showing the different settings

Fixed gold color: E5BF65
Material Surface: Glossy, Transparent Glossy, Translucent Glossy, Velvet Glossy, Diffuse Glossy, Diffuse