IOR Material List

Overview

Finding the right IOR values should be quick and easy. This table provides reliable, hand-picked refractive index values for your 3D materials with just one click.

Features

• Search for materials, categories, or IOR values
• Find materials using synonyms, for example, "cloth" for "fabric"
• Easily spot common materials marked with ★
• Copy to clipboard with a single click
• Click material names to view source references
• All values are carefully selected and cross-checked for accuracy

Simple IOR for common materials

For most materials like glass, wood, or plastic, a single IOR value is all you need:

1. Find your material in the table
2. Click to copy the value (or choose any value between IOR and Max IOR)
3. Paste it into your material's IOR input field

Complex IOR for metals

For most projects, RGB IOR is overkill. Usually it’s enough to set Metalness to 1 and pick the base and specular colors. For accurate colors, use values from Physically Based.

But if you want to be precise:

1. Check how your renderer works with RGB IOR:
   • Redshift: use the IOR to Metal Tints node
   • Octane: set Metallic Reflection Mode to RGB IOR
   • Cycles: in the Metallic BSDF shader, set Fresnel Type to Physical Conductor
2. Find your metal in the table
3. Copy the RGB values and paste them following the same order shown in the table

Technical notes

Where possible, I've used IOR at green light wavelength (550 nm), near the center of the visible spectrum, for consistency.

For materials with very similar IOR and Max IOR values (difference ≤0.04), I've used an average number to keep things simple. Materials with larger differences show their full range.

Even though most values come from verified publications, they've been curated for 3D rendering applications and shouldn't be used for scientific research.

If you want to dive deeper into IOR, for example, why metals need complex values or why regular IOR can’t be below 1 — check out my article:
About the IOR Material List

Download dataset

The complete dataset is available as a CSV file for free.

License: CC BY 4.0 — Free to use with attribution