Indigo Renderer Forum

I just tried Nicks carpaint, and while it gives really nice looking speckles, it won’t converge in the darker areas of the car and stays noisy, probably because of the normal map:
I’m trying to think of another way to get those metallic flakes sparkle without making the whole carpaint noisy, something like this:
I’m trying a coating with the substrate being a blend between a normal specular reflection phong, and another phong with a spec-map texture in its specular and fresnel slots. It looks like this:
I’m thinking the sparkles aren’t bright enough in the light areas, and too much visible in the less bright areas (like the reflections from the floor). Does anyone have any idea on how to fix this? Feel free to edit the material file:

Working on a better carpaint material:

I also found and fixed a bug while working on this, which is that the substrate shading normal was not being used in some cases for coating mats, which means coating mats with different substrate normals looked somewhat wrong.

Testing a pearlescent paint - each individual flake has its own metal oxide coating - 4um thick, which gives interference. Since each flake is randomly oriented, this gives a kind of random 'rainbow' colour to each flake.

Here's my first try with the new carpaint. I must say it's very hard to know when to stop rendering - this rendered for 8 hours, and the carpaint still showed big difference when updating.

Also the carpaint seems to struggle with small, high intensity light sources.

In what way is it 'struggling'?

I think he means that "fireflies" which aren't ones but flakes.


Cheers, zeiti

Don't know what was wrong with my flakes there then. It should obviously not look like that.

Oscar J wrote:Don't know what was wrong with my flakes there then. It should obviously not look like that.

Perhaps is it as should; with a small light source, only a few specifically oriented flakes will send the light back to the camera. Such real shots are rare for a reference though.

CTZn wrote:

Oscar J wrote:Don't know what was wrong with my flakes there then. It should obviously not look like that.

Perhaps is it as should; with a small light source, only a few specifically oriented flakes will send the light back to the camera. Such real shots are rare for a reference though.

Maybe after a really long render time it would converge to a more realistic looking image.

This one was done using the car paint I attached to my originally post. I think it looks damn good apart from the fact that the spec map I'm using is a texture with flakes that aren't evenly spaced enough, which makes the car paint look non-uniform. If anyone good with ISL could make a procedural version of my spec map, that'd make a really good car paint, me thinks.