Car Paint

The Car Paint material is a material that simulates a metallic car paint. It is a complex material with four layers: a base diffuse layer, a base glossy layer, metallic flakes layer, and clear coat layer. The material allows the adjustment of each of these layers separately.

Base Layer

Base Color - The diffuse color for the base layer.

Base Reflection - The reflectivity of the base layer. The reflection color itself is the same as the Base color.

Base Glossiness - Reflection glossiness for the base layer.

Base Bump Float/Amount - A multiplier for the bump/normal effect.

Base Bump Color - Specifies the bump/normal map that is going to be used.

Flakes Layer

Flake Color - The color of the metal flakes. 

Flake Glossiness - The glossiness of the metal flakes. It is not recommended to set this above 0.9 as it may produce artifacts. 

Flake Orientation - Controls the orientation of the flakes relative to the surface normal. When this is 0.0, all flakes are perfectly aligned with the surface. When it is 1.0, the flakes are rotated completely randomly with respect to the normal. Values above 0.5 are not recommended as they can produce artifacts.

Flake Uvwgen - Specifies the UWV mapping of the flakes.

Coat Layer

Coat Color - The color of the coat layer.

Coat Strength - The strength of the coat reflections when the surface is viewed directly from the front.

Coat Glossiness - Glossiness of the coat reflections.

Coat Bump Float/Amount - A multiplier for the bump or normal map.

Coat Bump Color - An input slot for the bump or normal map.

Environment Override – Controls the override color or texture used.

Coat Layer

Type – Specifies whether a bump map or a normal map effect will be added to the coat layer. 

Bump – Applies the map as a bump map.
Normal (Tangent) – Applies the map as a normal map in tangent space.
Normal (Object) – Applies the map as a normal map in object space.
Normal (Camera) – Applies the map as a normal map in screen/camera space.
Normal (World) – Applies the map as a normal map in world space.
From Bump Output – The map is applied as determined by map type itself.
Explicit Normal – Applies the map as an explicit normal.

Trace Reflection - Toggle reflections for the coat layer.

Flake Layer

Density - The density (number of flakes) for a certain area. Lower values produce less flakes and higher values produce more flakes. Set this to 0.0 to produce a material without flakes.

Scale - Scales the entire flake structure.

Size - The size of the flakes relative to the distance between them. Higher values produce bigger flakes and lower values produce smaller flakes.

Flake filtering - Determines the way the flakes are filtered. Filtering is extremely important to reduce the work required to produce a clean image. The possible values are:

• Simple - This method is faster and uses less RAM but is less accurate. It averages the orientation of the flakes together, which may alter the appearance of the material when viewed from a distance.

• Directional - This method is slightly slower and uses more RAM, but is more accurate. It groups the flakes based on their orientation before performing the filtering, so that the material appearance is preserved. 

Map size - Determines the size of the bitmaps. Internally the material creates several bitmaps to store the generated flakes. Lower values reduce RAM usage, but may produce noticeable tiling in the flake structure. Higher values require more RAM, but tiling is reduced. Be careful when using the Directional filtering method, as it may quickly take up gigabytes of RAM for larger map sizes.

Seed - The random seed for the flakes. Changing this produces different flake patterns. 

Trace Reflection - Toggle reflections for the flake layer.

Base Layer

Type – Specifies whether a bump map or a normal map effect will be added to the base material. 

Bump – Applies the map as a bump map.
Normal (Tangent) – Applies the map as a normal map in tangent space.
Normal (Object) – Applies the map as a normal map in object space.
Normal (Camera) – Applies the map as a normal map in screen/camera space.
Normal (World) – Applies the map as a normal map in world space.
From Bump Output – The map is applied as determined by map type itself.
Explicit Normal – Applies the map as an explicit normal.

Trace Reflection - Toggles reflections for base layer.

Options

Subdivs - Determines the amount of samples for the glossy reflections of the different layers. This parameter has effect only when the Use Local Subdivs option is enabled from the Global DMC Sampler Settings.

Cutoff - Cutoff threshold for the reflections of the different layers.

Flake mapping type - Specifies the method for mapping the flakes. The possible values are:

Explicit - The flakes are mapped using the specified channel.

Triplanar  - The material automatically computes mapping coordinates in object space based on the surface normals.

Mapping channel - The mapping channel for the flakes when the Flake mapping type is set to Explicit.

Double sided - When enabled, the material is double-sided.

Environment Priority - Specifies how to determine the environment to use if a reflected or refracted ray goes through several materials each of which has an environment override.