I'm looking at improving my car paint workflow. After using products like Renderman and Vred I noticed that their car paint solutions are quite nice. They use normal maps to offset the reflection direction slightly to create that nice metallic paint flake appearance.
https://renderman.pixar.com/forum/do.../pxrFlakes.php
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Renderman uses procedural circles that are applied via a normal map
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vRed uses a slightly different pattern which also looks good
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It looks like procedural layered diamond patterns and is quite effective
I find that Vray flakes are not the most intuitive or easy to preview flake solution on the market. Most Automotive artists I've worked with tend not to use the Vray Carpaint material.
I normally make my own blend material setup with a flake texture mapped into the specular of the base material. But looking at these simple bump mapped solutions I think I can get a better result by using the above techniques.
More recently I've discovered OSL flakes which are remarkably similar to the Renderman option.
http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/O...es+normal+map#
It does everything I want it to except work as a tri planar projection. It feels quite limited because it seems to rely on UVs to get its texture coordinates. That would be fine for a simple model but it's usually too much work to unwrap every CAD body panel especially when you want to reuse the shader and still keep the look consistent.
Using the complex IOR OSL combined with OSL Flakes I think a very realistic paint is possible. I'm sure it might come with its own AA sampling issues but maybe some work could be done to improve how vRay produces procedural flake effects?
It would be great to learn more about other peoples setups and discuss.
https://renderman.pixar.com/forum/do.../pxrFlakes.php
Renderman uses procedural circles that are applied via a normal map
vRed uses a slightly different pattern which also looks good
It looks like procedural layered diamond patterns and is quite effective
I find that Vray flakes are not the most intuitive or easy to preview flake solution on the market. Most Automotive artists I've worked with tend not to use the Vray Carpaint material.
I normally make my own blend material setup with a flake texture mapped into the specular of the base material. But looking at these simple bump mapped solutions I think I can get a better result by using the above techniques.
More recently I've discovered OSL flakes which are remarkably similar to the Renderman option.
http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/O...es+normal+map#
It does everything I want it to except work as a tri planar projection. It feels quite limited because it seems to rely on UVs to get its texture coordinates. That would be fine for a simple model but it's usually too much work to unwrap every CAD body panel especially when you want to reuse the shader and still keep the look consistent.
Using the complex IOR OSL combined with OSL Flakes I think a very realistic paint is possible. I'm sure it might come with its own AA sampling issues but maybe some work could be done to improve how vRay produces procedural flake effects?
It would be great to learn more about other peoples setups and discuss.
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