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The VRayStochasticFlakesMtl material can be used to simulate car paints, snow and other glittery materials. It works by simulating at render time the aggregated effect of a large number of mirror-like flakes scattered over the surface of an object. The material is somewhat similar to the VRayFlakesMtl and VRayCarPaintMtl materials, but uses less memory and avoids the tiling issues for these materials. The term stochastic means "using a random variable".

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Enable Flakes

 – When enabled, the material simulates flakes scattered on the surface of the object. If disabled, the material renders the specified BRDF type with the specified glossiness. For more details, please see

the Enable Flakes example below.

Num Flakes

 – The number of flakes, expressed as the square root of the actual number of flakes in the unit texture square. For example, a value of 3000 generates 9,000,000 flakes in the unit texture square. The number of flakes is restricted to 2³¹ (a little over 2 billion), which means the highest useful value

for Num Flakes

 is 46340. If you need more than 2 billion flakes, increase

the Flake

Scale parameter. For more details, please see

the Number of Flakes example below.

Hilight Glossiness

 – Controls the distribution of the flakes. Values close to 1.0 orient all flakes with normals pointing more perpendicular to the surface, whereas lower values randomize the normals of the flakes. For more information, please see

the Highlight Glossiness example below.

Blur Angle

 – Controls the "softening" of the flakes effect. Higher values produce softer results, while smaller values make the flakes sharper. Usually, value between 0.5 and 8 are used. For more information, please see

the Blur Angle example below.

Reflect Filter – Specifies the reflection color of the flakes.

Mapping Type

 – Specifies the way the flakes are scattered on the surface:

Explicit

UVW – The flakes are mapped according to the specified mapping channel. The density of the flakes on the surface depends on the way the UVs follow the surface. 
Triplanar from Object XYZ

 – The material uses triplanar mapping to create the flakes. This mode is useful for objects that don't have suitable UV mapping.

Mapping Channel

 – Specifies which map channel to use

when Mapping Type

 is set

to Explicit UVW channel.

Flake Scale

 – Controls the scale of the texture space.

When Mapping Type

 is set to Explicit UVW channel, a value of 1.0 is recommended. For Triplanar from Object XYZ mapping, the Num

Flakes amount is distributed in each square unit in local object coordinates. In this case it is necessary to lower the Flake Scale value to 0.05, 0.01, or even less, and increase the Num Flakes value depending on the object size, especially if square artifacts are observed.

Brdf Type

 – Specifies the BRDF used to guide the distribution of the flakes:

GGX

 – Uses GGX distribution for the flakes (the GGX distribution has a longer "tail" compared to Beckmann).
Beckmann – Uses a Beckmann distribution for the flakes. 

Seed – The seed for the randomization of flakes.

 Changing this value produces different flake patterns.

Colored Flakes – Dropdown to enable Colored Flakes.

Off – No variance to the specified color for the flakes is applied. 
Random Hue – Enables randomized hue for the flakes. 
Random from Map – Enables use of a texture map for randomized colors.

Saturation

 – Determines the saturation variation of the colors for all flakes.

Lightness

 – Controls the lightness variation of the colors for all flakes.

Random Color Map

 – Available

when Colored Flakes

 is set

to Random from Map. Specifies a texture from which random colors are sampled and applied to the flake color.

White Average

 – When enabled, renders colored flakes without the darkening effect. Note that this is not physically correct.

 
Input ramp using V space

Only Yellow-colored flakes are produced. Click on the image for a larger resolution.

Blend Min

 – Specifies the number of flakes per pixel below which the flakes are computed. When the number of flakes per pixel is above this value, the material gradually transitions into a smooth (non-discrete) BRDF.

Blend Max

 – Specifies the number of flakes per pixel above which the material will only compute the smooth (non-discrete) BRDF. If the number of flakes per pixel is below this value, the material gradually transitions into discrete flakes.