Special Plastic Material

Hello! I want to make a special matte plastic material as seen in the picture, but there was no detailed information on the forums on how to make it. I would be happy if you help me…

Hi! Could you upload a better picture? This could literally be anything…

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From your picture, I see a black rectangle with a gray border. You don’t need special materials to do that, you can do with a diffuse BSDF. Heck, you can do that in Microsoft Excel if you really want just by coloring cells

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I’ll try this…


I need this fog headlight’s black plastic material…

Probably just a very dark Principled with high roughness for the matte, and with a reduced IOR level in specular if roughness alone doesn’t make it dark enough. That said, also make sure you have compatible lighting and bounced energy.

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Welcome :tada:

…you tried any search engine with: blender simple plastic material ??

I think this is simple enough for your special plastic ( ← no pun… really… i simply think it’s not “that special” ← again: no pun :wink: )

20240811_Mount.Plastic.Matt_001.blend (696.8 KB)

That’s under a Nishita Sky node with some procedural clouds for a little visual interest. Base color isn’t 000000 Black, so it can go darker if need be.

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It should probably be darker, although that alone won’t fix the problem. The car photo is exposed for an outdoor scene, so you need to reduce the exposure setting as well to better match.

Download a human model verified to have albedos with proper skin values. Place that in the scene, with face directly lit by the sun, and switch temporarily to sRGB space. Reduce the exposure so that there is “no” (at least not in highly specular patches) clipping of any color, and a little beyond that. That should be fairly close to what we know as a sunny/16 exposure.

With nishita background set to 1, and a more logical albedo value for that bright ground you have, I’m guessing exposure would end up in the -4 to -3 range.

Does that help? If not share the minimum required of the scene to reproduce, and maybe someone will have a look at it.

You seem to be replying to me as if I’m the OP, I’m not. I took your suggestion and tried it, that’s all, just trying to help. Also posted the blend file, so anybody (including you) could make those changes and see. Or use a completely different setup more appropriate to the issue, what I posted is one of my material test scenes.

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If you search for good interior and exterior car materials then you can look into the car configurator of the Unreal engine.
The best is,that all these materials are working very well together.
Its from the Ue 4.x i have not looked for updates yet.However these was free to download.


In the opened car configurator you can select the mesh you want to inspect.(left arrow)
after click on it you get a detail view of the mesh part (middle arrow)

then you get a list of materials the mesh uses.
after click on the materials in the mesh detail view on the right side then material detail properties are shown.,that you can scroll down for more data.

Another example the car paint material from the side door.


shot from scroll down at the right side

and the end of the material scroll

If you click on the master material on the right,you can see the shader node build

Sorry, didn’t notice the blend. I scrolled to one of OPs posts to see the original image. As for color, I’d just use the values from UE shown above, and adjust the exposure to get in the right ballpark. Add other stuff and see if it still makes sense.

As for sunny/16 rule, the face will be a little underexposed under those settings, the idea is that you can just set that manual exposure in a camera and no face under direct sun will be overexposed.

I tried my own approach to “finding approximate sunny/16” using a high quality PBR dude I got from renderpeople. This is a black guy though, so skin color is already a bit on the dark side, but -4 exposure made sure he was well exposed in direct nishita sunlight at strength 1 with sRGB. A little leeway due to his skincolor, but white parts of his shirt clipped a tiny bit. So yeah, trying to go for sunny/16 exposure rule, I think -4 exposure is a pretty good guess.

Is this the topic you meant to reply to? Because this one’s about a matt plastic material for a piece (foglight mount) of an automobile.

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Yes. It’s a method to determine what a decent ballpark exposure value should be for an outdoor direct sunlight (say, using Nishita sun & sky set at strength 1) shot should be. Using close to correct albedo values isn’t gonna help much if the exposure is set completely wrong. I came to about -4, it’s not “accurate” per se, it just shows exposure 0 is far too bright and dark plastic is going to get washed out.

Thanks for tying it back into the plastic material, I think I get it now. Giving it a shot:

screenshot.2024-08-18 16.03.16

20240818_Mount.Plastic.Matt_001.blend (682.4 KB)

:flushed: Huh, seems like something’s gone wrong there. Although I’ll grant the material looks very nicely dark. Looking at the Wikipedia article on the sunny/16 rule that you mentioned earlier, it’s about both the exposure and the f-stop or focal length.

FYI to anyone who hasn’t already figured it out: I’m not a photographer. :camera_flash: Blender has an F-Stop setting in the Depth of Field section of any Camera’s Data Properties, the default is 2.8. Setting it to 16 instead didn’t seem to help. Nor did messing around with the Focal Length in its Lens section. Not sure how to get the sunny/16 rule to work for this.

Focal length (zoom) doesn’t matter. It’s about aperture (how much light enters the lens), shutter speed (how long the sensor gathers light), and ISO sensitivity (the sensor gain).

I wouldn’t use AgX/Punchy for this, as Sunny/16 applies to filmstock and also considered safe for old RGB sensors. The “bright sky” looks very dark. I would also definitely drop the highly saturated “ground” you have, as its tint shows up clearly.

Sunny/16: You set this to shoot a front lit face in direct sunlight, and nothing would be overexposed. It’s a go to approach if you don’t have a light meter or a camera with auto exposure capabilities.

Unfortunately, Blender don’t have a physical camera model wrt exposure, so the F-Stop only applies to Depth of Field, not exposure.

Would be better if OP provided a model for us to have a go with, a shader ball in a highly unrealistic environment isn’t going to do the trick. But as far as the material goes, there’s nothing “special” about it, other than maybe some of the “roughness” coming from tiny bumps not observable from the photo.

Usually if you make a look dev “calibration” of your scene,you do it with the 18%grey card method.

You can use the macbeth chart for this,or a diffuse shader with 0.18 RGB values typical on a smooth sphere.

Then adjust the exposure until the bright highlight part of the grey sphere is 0.5 with the colorpicker.This is roughly how you adjust your scene exposure to the middle grey.For sRGB gamma 2.2 target grey of 0.46.For rec 709 gamma 2.4 target grey 0.49.

Like this,i rotated the sun for this example,otherwise you can expose shadow if you have no direct sun light and your subject is mainly in the shadow.But keep in mind that the outside of the shadow in the scene gets overexposed then.You have to try this a bit to get feel for the target you want to expose.

False color

Here with a HDRi lighting,example

The 0.5 is not correct for a sRGB gamma of around 2.2.Since 0.18^(1/2.2)=0.458…


with a exposure of a grey target 0.46 rougly,the plastic color looks believable.

If you tonemap in Resolve with a output of rec709 and a gamma of 2.4 then around 0.49 is the middle grey then

That’s usually a rough 000000 black, not the best backdrop for this material. But if Blender Logo Orange is too unrealistic for this, how 'bout a procedural asphalt? That’s what it’s supposed to be, anyway. :flushed:

The intent of the Nishita Sky’s sun position vs the camera’s in my test scene is to see a material sunlit, and in shadow (with skylight & surrounding bounce), and the border between (some of these use Bump and/or Displacement), in the same render. I’ll grant it’s not best for most other uses, which also goes for using Nishita instead of an HDRI.

I was wondering if somebody was gonna suggest that! Working with (some of) what you’ve shown, I think I got decent results with an Exposure of -0.80:

20240820_Mount.Plastic.Matt_002.blend (706.9 KB)

Looks like the OP hasn’t checked the forum since the 11th. Well, we’ve had fun with it.

I would adjust it like this