Car paint metal flake

[drift501]

For my current project I need to have a car paint material that supports a metal flake effect such as this


I have been having trouble trying to replicate the extreme flake effect in cycles, here is the best I can do and this is somewhat hacking it by making the flakes emissive based on the camera angle

(The node setup does have links running off down the image, these are not important to the issue, the input to the mix node that is not visible is an anisotropic shader designed to simulate metal leaf and the mix shader just overlays it onto the paint based on a mask)

I am aware there is a metallic car paint shader available however I have tried it and whilst it works for less dramatic paint it doesn’t work when trying to simulate extreme metallic paints.

[moony]

I did some experiments with this a while back. Whilst this is far from a complete solution - it may give you some ideas.

The basic idea is to use the voronoi texture to drive the flake - but put it through the normal slot so that each flake is given a slightly different angle. This has the effect of making each flake reflect when the light is in a different position giving you the glitter/sparkle effect.

The flake glossy is then added to itself multiple times to overdrive the color/brightness of the sparkle. A smooth glossy overcoat is then added in at the end.