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

[Stimpanzee]

The reflections on the clear coat is being driven by a scene capture actor. It seems to be the easiest way to get accurate realtime reflections. It has a few shortcomings at the moment, because it's not entirely accurate when applying it to my system. It's a little expensive as well. Once I clean up the shader, I will post of few pictures of the material graph.

The car model is my interpretation of those plastic models, the ones car painters use to test their blends. It is nice to have for my own testing.

[smokey13]

that looks awesome

I have been able to create a paint shader with real time reflections and realistic paint flake.

couple of questions, is the reflection set up in the material or is it a reflection capture? will this work on a moving vehicle?

also just out of curiosity are you going to make your futuristic looking car drivable?

[Jacky]

It definitely looks a lot better now!

[Stimpanzee]

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since I had some quality time to sit down and improve my car paint shader. Since my last post, I have dumped the concept of using a transparent material using separate geometry. Transparency can produce wonderful results with static objects, fairly easily. But my goal is to create a fully dynamic paint shader based on the current, physically based rendering system. After playing around with a few different methods, I have been able to create a paint shader with real time reflections and realistic paint flake.

The shader is simulating 3 surfaces, similar to the three major layers in metallic car paint: base, flake, and clear coat. Currently, this is being handled by blending three separate material functions. My next goal is to clean the system up and squeeze everything into a single shader. One that can be used to create instances and includes parameters.

Once that is finished, I would like to put together a tutorial to share my system and my process of creating it with the community. This shader is far from perfect, but I think it could act as a good stepping stone for other developers.

Current limitations are:
1 - normal map (orange peel) doesn't affect the clear coat reflection, because capture maps is being driven through the emission channel
2 - the paint flake values override the value from the clear coat, which is beneficial when the flake is in highlight, but when the flake is reflecting a dark value, dark spots appear.
3 - clear coat is not handling highlights from scene lights correctly

These and a few smaller issues are in need of fine tuning. Although, I am certain other issues are currently unknown to me. Anything stand out in these images as wrong or inaccurate? I could use as many sets of eyes as I can get!

[Jacky]

Stimpanzee improved it nicely in the final image.

Just to be clear, those values in the material setups were used to show the effect that can be achieved with fresnel and cosine so the user needs to tweak them until they get the looks they are after.

[Tim Hobson]

This is a worth taking a look if you're looking at doing any types of vehicles or interesting shaders.

Take a look and please add to it here if you like.

Tim

https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...-paint-sh.html