Metallic Car Paint Material - Tutorial

Development Asset Creation
1

Hello everyone,

Over the summer I have put together a killer material which can simulate most types of car paint surfaces, and uses real time reflections. I just finished putting together a tutorial, and I thought I would share it with you all!

http://www.caferaces.com/p/tutorials.html

Here are the types of results you can expect once you have constructed the material.


If you get stuck, have any questions, comments, or improvements, please send me a message!

Good luck!

2

Thanks Vince!

Btw, have you checked the new clear coat shader?

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You are welcome ! I have spent some time playing around with the new clear coat shading model. It certainly much easier to build a metallic paint using it, but it still lacks the dynamic reflections. I would definitely consider using it for all non-hero vehicles in my game, to save performance costs. In the tutorial, I talk more about the benefits of both my system and the new clear coat model.

4

Oh, cool! Thanks again. :slight_smile:

5

Brilliant!

Thanks for the tutorial, ive been looking for something like .

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That was a bug that is fixed now. SSR was using Roughness instead of ClearCoatRoughness when the clear coat model was used.

7

Great tutorial Stimpanzee!

I finished your tutorial morning and got an amazing result, it really looks fantastic, thank you so much! :slight_smile:
I am also working on a secondary version using the built clear coat, I am trying to see just how close I can get it to look to your full tutorial by connecting nodes to the ClearCoat/ClearCoatRoughness slots in the MakeAttributes node and have had some success getting the effect pretty close! I know I won’t get exact, but I plan to use the Full shader for the player’s vehicle, and the ClearCoat shader for any other cars in the race. I think that would be the best way to get around the performance, but we’ll see.

Great tutorial though man, I loved it! taught me some new things, new ways to do things I already knew… etc. Overall a great tutorial!

EDIT: Images placed here were removed to clean up the thread a bit as I noticed you updated your tutorial, and they no longer apply.

But as mentioned before, is an awesome tutorial! Thanks again for taking the time to do up for the community, it will help me (and many others) immensely! :smiley:

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Thanks ! I knew that I must have made a mistake somewhere. I will change the images on the site to correspond with the text.

There is definitely a few ways to go about making the shader work with the clear coat shading model, eliminating the scene capture. The only hang up, at the moment, is the bump data from the flake is rendered on top. So the clear coat inherits that bumpy noise. For a completely smooth surface you will have to remove that normal texture. Which is unfortunate because the flake bump really helps sell the metallic paint look. But if you are going to be using that shader variation on a non-player vehicle, it should work out nicely!

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Very cool! I’m glad SSR is back for the clear coat.

I suppose I should have specified a little though: material reflections with SSR look great, but with the use of the scene capture actor, it’s possible to get the full 360 reflection space.
I was referring to the technique of using the capture actor as “dynamic reflections”. Somewhat of a misnomer. I guess my head is still stuck in the UDK days.

When I have a little more free time, I’m going to create a variation of shader utilizing the Clear Coat model. Is there any plans on adding a normal map function, specifically for the clear coat? I imagine that’s outside of the realm of possibilities for now. But one of the shortcomings of the Clear Coat model is how it inherits the bump data from the rest of the material.

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There are a limited number of channels in the GBuffer. It may be possible but at a cost. The clear coat model was intended for thin layers. Different normals wasn’t really a design consideration.

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Is there any way to eliminate the bump data from the rest of the material, so that the clear coat renders smoothly over the surface? While still retaining the lighting information from the rest of the material?

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Hi Vincent thank you about your tutorial,
I tried with 4.12.2 but with BluePrint I haven’t the same functions to build a material
How can I do it?

Thanks,
have a great day
M

13

Hello. Really great tutorial. Gets you up and running with a quality carpaint really quickly. One thing I noticed, you said in the tutorial “Normal maps don’t affect emissive so orange peel normal map doesn’t change the look of the reflections produced by the capture” but if you are using the custom reflection vector, you can just plug your orange peel normal map into a into a transform node which transforms it from a tangent space to world space and than plug that into the CustomReflectionVector nodes Normal(V3). Wouldn’t that solve the problem of the normal map not affecting the reflections?

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Yes, that is true! is how I achieved orange peel in the materials I sell on the marketplace. I need to go back and revise the material tutorials to include that . I would also like to go into more detail on using the clear coat shading method, as it has seen big improvements since I first wrote the tutorial. I have been short on time these days, ever since I joined Psyop to help create Kismet VR.

Good catch!