This material is a specialized shader to easily create rendering of cars. Most cars are painted with a metallic paint that has specular flakes in a coat over a base surface. Note that the same look can also be achieved using the 3Delight Principled shader alongside the Flake 3D Texture but this Material frees the artist from cumbersome shading network manipulations.
Coating |
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Coating is an important part of a car paint as it affects the overall look in three main aspects:
- It provides a richer specular response to light as it adds a specular highlight on top of the base surface's highlight.
- It can colour light as it passes through the coating.
- It contains metallic particles (a.k.a flakes) suspended inside the coat.
→ Thickness
The thickness of the coating layer. The thicker the layer the more it absorbs light and the less of the base layer is visible. A thickness of 0 disables the coating.
→ Color
The colouring produced by this coating layer. Colouring will be more prominent in thicker layers.
→ Roughness
Roughness of the coating layer.
→ Specular Level
How "shiny" is the coating. A value of 1 means a very shiny coating.
Flakes |
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Flakes are little metallic particles floating inside the coating. They give the sparkly look to most car paints. This section controls the characteristics of these flakes.
→ Color
The colour of each flake.
→ Roughness
The roughness of each flake.
→ Scale
The scale of each flake.
→ Density
Sets the fraction of the surface on which flakes are visible. A density of 0.5 means that a flakes cover half of the surface.
→ Layers
Flakes are floating inside the coat layer and this parameter controls how many total layers there is. Flakes in a given layer hide flakes in the bottom layers.
→ Randomness
How is random is the orientation of flakes. A value of 0 means that all flakes are oriented as the surface normal. A value of 1 means totally random directions.
Base Layer |
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→ Color
The colour of the base layer.
→ Metallicity
Mainly controls the colour of the reflections. Reflection from metals has the colour of the light whilst non-metals reflect the colour of the surface.
→ Specular Level
Controls the strength of specular reflections on the base layer.
→ Roughness
The roughness of the base layer.
Normal Map / Bump |
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