Interesting post from AnswerHub on how to setup a Layer Car Paint shader

[Stimpanzee]

Car Materials on the Marketplace Trello!

It has finally happened! The materials spoken about in this post could have the chance to be sold on the Marketplace. If you are interested in using my material system to simulate: car paint, carbon fiber, chrome, and glass in your game - head over to the trello and give my submission a vote. I would love to see what everyone could do with the full materials!

[DotCam]

Voted! They look great!

Here is a direct link to your submission so it shows up when you click the link:
https://trello.com/c/VBqS3POd/209-st...-car-materials

[Jacky]

Glad to hear that you finally made it to Trello. Voted!

[Stimpanzee]

Thanks guys! I'm stoked to see the votes coming in! I'm all over the place right now and can only check in a couple times a day. My class is near the end of the semester and my students are putting together their final projects in UE4. Crunch time!

[Jacky]

So i've been lucky to get my hands on those materials and here are some screenshots:













And i must say i dont think the Marketplace will see a better car paint pack than this one until UE5 whenever that may be.

[smallB]

@Stimpanzee
Hi, unfortunately I'm still in the process of picking up pieces of my jaw after I saw your car paint
Had to go to forest for couple of days and scream at the moon and stones. Had to learn how to read and write from scratch.
Voted! Will buy! Will live again!!! Material looks simply amazing!!!

[Stimpanzee]

@Stimpanzee
Hi, unfortunately I'm still in the process of picking up pieces of my jaw after I saw your car paint
Had to go to forest for couple of days and scream at the moon and stones. Had to learn how to read and write from scratch.
Voted! Will buy! Will live again!!! Material looks simply amazing!!!

Hahaha, thanks! It was passed on the trello! Now I'm just waiting to hear back from Epic on instructions for what's next. Hopefully it should be for sale in the next month or so!

[Stimpanzee]

Massive Performance Gains

It's been a little quite around here over the holidays, but I do have some great news to report! In the 4.6 update, scene capture actors gained parameters governing rendering features. Meaning it is now possible to fine tune the quality level of the scene captures. With a little bit of testing, I have determined the best option for visual quality and performance.

The biggest hit to performance with the captures are from lighting. The scene capture is rendering in six directions, each of which has it's own unique render tree. With deferred lighting enabled, there is a considerable decrease in performance. This is the main reason most developers have avoided using this technique. But now there is a function to disable deferred rendering. The result is nearly identical visual quality and an average increase of 25% FPS! The use of the capture is now so small, that it could be added to nearly every scene.

With deferred rendering disabled, the capture is only capturing light from textures with emission and skylights. The technique for gaining the proper highlights is to assign emissive textures to your light sources. This way, not only is there a light to cast on the base coats, but the clear coat also has values which it can render. This is all a little hard to explain, but I will be going over it in the video documentation for the materials when they are for sale on the marketplace. For now, here is a little demonstration video of the performance gains.

Oh and I want to personally thank the person at Epic who implemented the new scene capture parameters! Thank you, whoever you are!

[DotCam]

Awesome news @Stimpanzee!

I might give this a try for my ocean shader, currently trying to redo and optimize it and is in desperate need of some reflectivity. That is a huge performance increase, I have been avoiding a capture cube for that exact reason but will give it another try after seeing your results. It looks like it is working correctly on the Glass material you have, which gives me hope I might be able to pull this off.

ps. Congrats on getting to the Marketplace! I am sure you will get a lot of sales, it is an incredible shader!!

[Stimpanzee]

Awesome news @Stimpanzee!

I might give this a try for my ocean shader, currently trying to redo and optimize it and is in desperate need of some reflectivity. That is a huge performance increase, I have been avoiding a capture cube for that exact reason but will give it another try after seeing your results. It looks like it is working correctly on the Glass material you have, which gives me hope I might be able to pull this off.

ps. Congrats on getting to the Marketplace! I am sure you will get a lot of sales, it is an incredible shader!!

I think it could work with an entire ocean, although I'm not sure what the best approach would be. Man, thinking about how difficult an ocean shader would be in the first place makes my head spin. Your shader uses translucency, which is why SSR is not an option, right?

I think the two hardest obstacles using the scene capture actors would be resolution and orientation. You've probably seen why the scene capture actors make terrible flat mirrors, I think you might run across the same problem with a large body of water, but it depends on the player location. If you are up close to the water an it is reasonably choppy water, you might t get away with it. Although, you would have no way of capturing local reflections. Stuff like ships on water. The capture would really only render the sky and very large assets in the distance. The more I think about it, the more difficult I think it might be.

You could try parenting the scene capture to your player pawn. Then the reflections would be more localized, but you might run into a whole host of other problems. Hopefully Epic will eventually add SSR to translucent materials, or a scene capture reflect actor, like in the old days of UDK. It is entirely possible that all the necessary tools already exist, but we are just unaware of how to uncover them. Usually the case in my experience. lol

[Stimpanzee]

Scalable Performance with Scene Capture Actors

Things seem to keep getting better and better. I have had a closer look into the new scene capture parameters an I put together a demo illustrating how the new parameters can be used to scale performance/quality. Because I'm sure everyone is bored with my scenes by now, I included my materials into Epic's racing game demo. In the first video, I work my way up from best performance, to higher quality reflections.

I am also adding a second video demonstrating the low performance hit of the standard reflection materials. In this demo, a racing game where the camera is typically 3rd person and far away from the car, the standard materials might be your best bet. For the absolute best looking car paint material, with sub surface glint and flake, you will have to take the performance hit with the scene capture actors. In my own game players will be controlling classic motorcycles in 1st person. I will be going with scene capture actor. Classic motorcycle manufactures were big fans of chrome and nickle platting. =)

View on youtube for fullscreen!

Scaling Performance

Standard Reflections

It seems like youtube has really degraded the video quality this time. I'm going to re-upload to vimeo for better quality to replace these.

[Stimpanzee]

I forgot that Vimeo requires a premium subscription for higher quality videos. Does anyone have a preferred free video hosting site which handles hit bitrate videos?

[Gethyn]

I forgot that Vimeo requires a premium subscription for higher quality videos. Does anyone have a preferred free video hosting site which handles hit bitrate videos?

I'm sorry i can't help you with that.

I just came by to say nice work! Looks amazing.

[joshezzell]

I gotta ask, how do you get a scene capture to interact with the material? I have been wondering how to get the reflection from a scene capture onto translucent objects for awhile now. Would be very useful for small bodies of water, like a lake or pond.

[kishars]

I setup on this material and here is the results, I just think to improved this by adding a AO MAP into material layer,maybe it's will be better,but my car have no UV mapping but thanks Tim Hobson and Stimpanzee,great job!