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

[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!!!

[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.

[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]

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

[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

[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!

[Stimpanzee]

And now something a little different.

One of the reasons I originally crafted this material system was so I could incorporate flaked motorcycle helmets in my game. Here is a look at the material doing its thing on a helmet prop I put together today.

[Jacky]

I agree that DFAO is messing things up with moving objects. I've finally had a chance to play with it in 4.5 and now my car is a blurry mess when you drive in an exterior view. :\ Your chrome technique looks promising though. I was already thinking of baking some details and textures to reduce poly count and this gives me more reason to do that.

[Stimpanzee]

Looks great Stimpanzee, the reflections look awesome!

Are you still using the render target approach? I heard they fixed some issues with clear coat recently but have not had time to try it out yet.

The Clear Coat shading model is handling SSR now, which greatly improves the look of the car paint shaders which take advantage of this method. Unfortunately, I have had bad luck using SSR on dynamic objects. Using a low roughness value material, with SSR enabled, causes a lot of weird ghosting artifacts when applied to moving objects. I have been having similar issues with distance field ambient occlusion, but that's another story.

The shaders in the video are using the same scene capture cube texture. There are actually two shaders on the Mustang: the main car paint shader, and a version which uses transparency. The car paint shader is capable of simulating car paint and chrome, so there are two instances handling that, and then one instance of the glass shader with a little extra tint added. At first, I didn't like the way the chrome looked on the car. In the Mustang video, the chrome is a little too bright. I ended up using the material sphere as a simulated light probe, to dial in better values.

For one of my motorcycle assets, I use AO maps for the chromed geometry. All I have to do is enable a switch in the material instance, then drag/drop in the AO into a texture parameter which appears. At that point, the AO texture becomes a reflection mask. Using this approach, you get better tones and values from the chrome which would be reflecting other parts of the asset. It's a good approach while we wait for ray tracing. lol

I submitted my materials to the marketplace so I'm crossing my fingers that they pass through. If they do, I will put together a detailed instructional video on how to fully benefit from the materials functions. In that video, I'll do a comparison of the chrome using an AO texture as a reflection map v.s. standard values. Perhaps it could be done dynamically one day, by adopting the engine's own AO. We will have to wait and see. =)

For now, here is another video of the shader being used practically. In this video, the chrome is using an AO texture as a reflection mask.

[Stimpanzee]

It's amazing to see how much you've improved this shader.

Thanks Jacky! It's interesting to look back at the process, and what I've learned. It all started with some crazy ideas we had!

[DotCam]

Looks great Stimpanzee, the reflections look awesome!

Are you still using the render target approach? I heard they fixed some issues with clear coat recently but have not had time to try it out yet.

[Jacky]

It's amazing to see how much you've improved this shader.

[Stimpanzee]

Video Update

Back again, with a video this time!

I have been running the shader in real time with the standard vehicle physics template. (I just fliped the visibility of the standard car mesh, and inserted a static car mesh into the blueprint.)

The results are promising! Thanks to the shader, it is possible to run car paint and chrome with high quality reflections on dynamic objects!

Take a look:

[Stimpanzee]

Took a bit of time to dial in the standard values for the dynamic rust system. Ended up playing around with an instance until I was happy with the results. Take a look!




This is a good example of how adaptable the system is. The best part is that it can all be controlled through instance parameters, so not only can you dramatically change the look of the paint at runtime, it's also easy to dial in the right look!

And of course the system is still running real time reflections based on a scene capture actor!

[iparra]

Thank you Stimpanzee! I will give a try to your advice.