I have been working on my first car for about half a year and after watching countless amount of tutorials I noticed that there is no proper car paints to be found anywhere. [After posting the thread some guys gave me links to some paints that were good, thanks for those!] After taking some quick notes on how the layer weight node works from various tutorials I have come up with this material setup:
When you don’t want flakes you simply disconnect the mix node to between the paint and the clearcoat layer.
If you want to have color you need to tinker with the nodes and mixing. Darker color always comes on top! Also try different layer weight values, it might look better in certain situations if you experiment with it.
The main thing is that when a surface of a car is looked from an angle it appears lighter because light gets “trapped” between the clearcoat and paint surface. Just like a fiber optic cable. But when you have a car with two or three coat metal-flake paint, the flakes shine and sparkle from the darker areas and fill some light in there. There is still a bit work to be done though because the reflections are not quite as bright as they should be.
Example image from google:
Note how paint looks in the bonnet for example.
I tried your shader in the scene I’m currently working on- I double checked all the nodes (using your screengrab as reference), and even used the color picker to be sure I got the same values, but it still doesn’t look right to me. I’ve also included a screenshot of the paint shader I’ve been using first (based on Thornton Strolia’s video tutorial), and a tweaked version of your shader at the bottom.
Are you using a different version of Blender for your nodes? I can’t think of another reason why my results would look different, unless the shader is meant for more diffused lighting. I think the flakes look really good, though, as do your sphere renders! I haven’t tried other colors yet.
Hmm. That’s really odd. I’m using blender 7.1 if i remember correctly i’m not at home atm. Try disconnecting the texture coordinates and mapping node and see if that helps at all. It looks like for some reason the shader is not rendering properly and thinks that the front of the car is in angle when looked from the camera. Also try the coordinate node from the camera to mapping instead of normal and see if it helps.
Oops im using my iphone atm and it didn’t reply to you properly. Anyway. Read the message i posted a out the mapping node. It looks like i have made a little mistale with the mapping. Try connecting camera an see if it helps or disconnect the mapping completely. If not, do you mind if I take a look at the scene? It looks fine in my own renders so I’m interested in what causes that.
Yup there was a problem with the coordinates node. I updated the material in the first post and now it should work correctly for you too.
For some reason it was rendering just fine with my pc. I quickly grabbed blender for my mac and tried building the same material and it ended up looking like s**t. But now its fixed :yes:
Also the colors I used in the material are not that important. Just keep in mind that dark comes on the upper slot and lighter color below it.
Heres a quick sphere render with the new material.
Thanks for posting the updated nodes, AxelWal! I’ll share some updates renders soon, both with bright and overcast lighting, to show how it looks on the car.
I have a question, if I want to change the color of the paint, which node(s) do I adjust the colours in? There are so many RGB mix nodes, it’s hard to know where to start.
I hope it’s not too confusing. The main thing is that darker/“deeper” color comes in top and the lighter shades come in the bottom. I tried to color the areas that are effected by changing the corresponding color in the material.
You could also flip the flare colors around to get more definition if you want. I also added another glossy layer with IOR on top to make the reflections pop out a bit more, but its nothing that you must do. I just thought to give it a try.
Hello all. I created an account to share my efforts on an all-purpose car paint shader. I know there are a lot of those out there, but none has given me the flexibility I need.
The node group I created allows one to do solid, metallic, pearlescent and a mix of any of those, metallic and pearlescent particle size, as well as providing a displacement map for “orange peel” paint.
These are some of the results I have gotten with it:
Do you have forgotten something with your information about carpaint node? Where is the link to download your blend, please?
The image of your setup is so difficult to read. What do you exchange with us, please?
!!!
