I previously did a tutorial on faking a layered car paint material. Now that we have material nodes in the upcoming 2.42, we don’t need to fake it, and have much more control. I thought I’d make a demo car paint material for the release notes using the nodes’ layering capabilities. Here I’m using pa-furijaz’s great beetle model, from the Blender Model Repository. The material is free to use under the Blender Artistic License.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. 
I’m really excited about trying out the nodes. For some reason I’ve been to lazy to dl the pre release versions. Can’t wait!
-Laurifer
Update! I rendered an animation too, to show how it looks in motion:
http://mke3.net/projects/tests/carpaint_nodes.mp4 (mpeg4 600 KB)
http://mke3.net/projects/tests/carpaint_nodes_xvid.avi (xvid 500 KB)
Thanks for the tut, Broken, I’m trying to figure out all the nodes that you had in there for all those materials - very detailed, very professional!!
So car commercials will be done with Blender soon,right?
-
Craigo
And I love the other Array animation too. The Nodes look sooooo much more intuitive than the material panels. I wonder how material groups(?) the ones linked to an object via the vertice groups will work? Can I have a node assigned for each vert group?
craigomatic: cheers!
David: well a node material is just a material comprised of a collection of nodes (which can include other ‘non-node’ materials as well). It’s a superset of the old material system, not necessarily a replacement. So the workflow for material indices is exactly the same, you just choose your node material from the list of available materials.
The nodes pretty much just let you blend a whole range of different things inside a material, rather than only textures. In my example, within the main node material, it’s blending some other materials as well as colours and falloff ramps.
Looks cool. 
Thanks for sharing the blend file.
Very cool. Thanks a lot; I’ve never understood what the deal is with the nodes but now I’m really excited about em.
would you be interested in making a quick tut on how you set that chain up? I am just figuring out nodes but it doesn’t have to be step-by-step, just broad strokes. It’s a great material