Vehicle Texturing: Making a carpaint

Vehicle Texturing: Making a carpaint

Basically.... Carpaints in 3D scenes are a science of their own. Many users ask us again and again for our material settings. Our answer is every time the same: It doesnt exist a universal usable paint material for real looking carpaints. The phenotype of a carpaint always depends on several factors and is an interplay of material, light, shade, environment and camera perspective. For example the lights and environment of the 3D vehicle have a great influence on the effect. Reflections and highlights appear, depending on the placing and way of the light sources, completely different in every scene. What looked perfect in this scene may be completely unacceptable in the next one. So its necessary to try several settings.

Material Setting Lets have an overview about the parameters we set in our Renault-Clio Scene. Making a new material First we make a new material. Start with FILE>NEW MATERIAL at the material manager menue. A doubleclick on the new material opens the material editor. Then rename the material in "carpaint" Color Activate COLOR and set the BRIGHTNESS to 0%. To get the sloping transition between the yellow front and the blue back we need a yellow texture. For that we create in a picture publishing software (f.e. Photoshop, Corel Photo Paint etc.) a dark yellow texture in 1024x768 px size and save it as a .tif or .jpg. Then upload the finished texture in the TEXTURE-channel (see screenshot "gelb.tif).
Reflection Next we need a reflection of the carpaint. We enable REFLECTION and scale the brightness to 23%. Keep all other parameters unchanged.
Specular By adding a specular we get the final carpaint effect. Change the mode to METAL. Put the width to 76%, the height to 100%, the falloff to 3% and the inner width to 0%.
Specular Color To finish we enable the SPECULAR COLOR, select a white color and set the brightness to 88%.
Mapping The carpaint material is ready now. Assign this to the bodywork of your 3d model (red arrow). To get the sloping transition between the yellow front and the blue backend we change the mapping method to FLAT. After that we select the icon "TEXTURE AXIS" in the left menue and change the angle of the X-axis to 180° and the Z-axis to -52,3°.
With or without HDRI? Perhaps you're are missing a HDRI-effect or a 360° image. Our Renault is shown in a white environment. It always comes along with a strange appearance when a HDRI (also with a strong blur effect) simulates an environment (buildings, windows, trees etc.) that doesnt exist in the scene. The trick with the environment Nevertheless you can get beautiful highlights on the screens and the carpaint with a small trick: Put a plate over the vehicle. For that create a new material, activate the LUMINANCE channel and assign it to the plate. The specific setting of the luminance brightness depends on your scene illumination. In case of using radiosity a lower brightness is required then without using radiosity. In our Scene we used a brightness of 120% without radiosity. To make the plate unvisible in the render its necessary to assign a rendertag. Make the following setting in the rendertag: "SEEN BY RAYS" and "SEEN BY GI". Disable all other rendertag settings. With changing the size, position and inclination you can simulate different highlights. More plates are also possible. Here it is also valid to try several positions and settings of the plate.

To conclude..... All off the mentioned settings were used for our Renault Clio render, but may be in your scene its necessary to make some adjustments (depending on the Light sources, environment and camera perspective) to get the same result :)