Vray car paint material, extract the map?

[irwit]

Hi all

I'm sure like most, you are loving the new car paint material, however I'm very quickly finding it just hasn't got the control I would like to control the material and am just plugging the material into a blend with everything but the flake set to black.

However I would also like to use the flake in just the specular channel for speed and so am wondering if I can somehow extract the map being created and use this in the bump and alpha of just a specular material plugged into a specular material

Also just for the record this is what I would add to the existing material.

Separate bump slots for each layer

Colour mixs for the flake.

options just just read specular for each layer

Make flake purely addative.

Give an opactiy for the flake layer as an option ( if not using in additive)

[vlado]

Can you explain a bit more about the "colour mixs"?

Otherwise, the other things are not too difficult (except for the additive flakes); will make a note to add them.

It is also planned to make just the flakes available as a separate material, so that you can use them directly in other complex materials.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Back to your original question, extracting the flakes is not very easy; in addition to a mask to determine their shape, you will also need to bake a normal map with their orientation. Even so, there is no easy way to recreate the directional filtering algorithm.

Best regards,
Vlado

[irwit]

Hi Vlado

Thanks for the quick reply.

How about including the flakes as a texture map as well as built into the car paint shader? I'm guessing its an alpha'd normal map?

In terms of colour mix, it would be handy to have a hue variance per flake or some kind of cheat to vary the hues of the car paint flake. Currently they are very uniform and since the flake in real like is actually a refraction or a reflection (depending on the quality of paint you use) you get a much more varied colour per flake.

If we had layers of paint flake if it was a separate texture we could layer some extra colours on ( I know this would create a significant hit of render times but would give us more control )

Its a great shader as is but I would love more control over those flakes.

Thanks again

Will.

[vlado]

I see; color variation is planned as well. In the meantime, you can simply map the flake color with some subtle noise texture.

Unfortunately it is not possible to represent the flakes with a simple texture map. That's why I said they are coming as a separate material.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Neilg]

I'm guessing its an alpha'd normal map?

This includes a nice texture map which can simulate flakes fairly well. I've used it for other things quite a bit too.
http://www.vray-materials.de/all_materials.php?mat=1921

I think its that one at least, i'm just going off the size.