The Most Flexible Car Paint Shader For Cycles

by Sebastião Silva in Surfacing


Is the car model included in the file?

No, it's not. The car model is one of Blender's demo files listed here: https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/

It's made by Mike Pan and licensed as CC0.

I'm having a hard time achieving a certain color (example: red), why is that?

The paint is composed of small differently colored flakes, so, as a first step, turn Flake Color Mismatch and Hue Shift fields to 0.000 and go from there. These are the two main controllers for hue differences between flakes.

Can I use this shader with Eevee?

Although I made this specifically for using with Cycles, there is no reason for it not being able to be used with Eevee. It might look slightly different, but still, not bad.

Update: Recent Blender versions (3.3 onwards) have "broken" Eevee previews (they show up as pink textures). Although this is the case now, Cycles functionality was not broken in any way.

The render is coming out too grainy, however, applying the denoiser takes the metallic flakes away. How do I solve this?

On the downloaded blend file, check the compositor nodes and import/append those to your own project file. 

It looks like the paint gets a slightly lighter color in my final render than in the rendered viewport, but why?

Turn up the samples for your viewport slightly. That is a result of the way path tracing works and how the paint is composed of tiny differently colored points, but, after a certain still low number of samples (I'm using 256 in my case), the color doesn't go noticeably lighter beyond that. Of course, situations change depending on your scene's lighting.

Sales 100+
Customer Ratings 2
Average Rating
Published almost 4 years ago
Blender Version 2.8, 2.81, 2.82, 2.83, 2.9, 2.91, 2.92, 2.93, 3.0, 3.1
Length 0
License Creative Commons
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