High-End Car Paint

[joconnell]

Exactly - if you had a photo of a car, a brdf scan of it's material and put that into a 3d scene, the cg car isn't going to look the exact same as the car in the photos since the lighting and environment is probably different - the major thing is taking something that's accurate and then changing it to what you want / adjusting to taste. If you're working with a client and say something is technically accurate that could be quite different from what they actually want or expected. They could want the look of the material of the car in the photo but in your new lighting / environment setup so it's a case of making adjustments until you get in the area of what you want.

[instinct]

There has been done some scanned BRDF stuff for VRay. Mind you that this wont necessarily give the desired look. For one it is quite a hassle to get the scanning
done and then it is hardly tweakable at all. So if the client wants a different result
that can get very difficult. In addition you'd need to scan all paints you wanna do. As of
course every paint is pretty different.

Having a decent Base Setup and tweaking it as needed for a specific result / environment currently seems the most feasible way to me.

(mind you we're hardly ever doing non-car stuff :P )

Regards,
Thorsten