Metallic Paint

Metallic Paint

Location: Nodes > Illumination > More...

Shader Type: Surface (material)

Output: Color (RGB) value

This shader is used to facilitate the rendering of metallic paint. You can use it to define the pigmentation layer and the metallic flakes, but not the clearcoat reflections.

To accomplish a full car paint effect, the metallic paint shader can be combined with Glossy Reflection and Bump Flakes. To get all these connections automatically, use the Car Paint shader, which also supports a dirt layer.

The metallic paint shader supports:

• Diffuse reflection in the pigmentation layer producing color shifts at edges due to viewing angle and incident light angle.

• Specular highlights from light sources in the metallic flakes suspended in the pigmentation layer. Including optional raytraced reflections in the metallic flakes.

• Specular highlight from light sources in the clearcoat layer. Including an optional glazing effect.

Surface

Ambient Color	The ambient light color component. This parameter is treated differently to the ambient/ambience parameter pair of many other base shaders in that it is influenced by the other diffuse color parameters on this property page. It represents incoming light, rather than the object’s ambient color.
Base Color	The base diffuse color of the material.

Edge Color Controls

Color	Represents the color shift between the base color and the edge color. The color seen at the edges usually appears much darker. For really deep metallic paints as seen on sports cars, the edge color tends to be almost black.
Falloff	Defines the falloff rate of the color towards the edge. The useful range is 0.0 to 10.0, where the value 0.0 turns the effect off. Higher values make the edge region narrower and lower values make it wider.

Lit Region Color Controls

Region Color	Defines the color seen in the illuminated area of the object’s surface.
Falloff	Defines the falloff rate of the color towards the light. The useful range is 0.0 to 10.0, where the value 0.0 turns the effect off. Higher values make the colored region facing the light smaller/narrower, while lower values makes it larger/wider.

Diffuse Controls

Weight	Modifies the overall level of the diffuse color parameters.
Falloff	Defines the falloff of the diffuse shading. The useful range is 0.5 to 2.0, where 1.0 represents standard Lambertian shading. Higher values push the diffuse peak towards the light source, and lower values flatten the diffuse peak.

Specular

Primary Highlight

Color	The color of the primary specular highlight.
Weight	Specifies the blend weight for the primary specular color.
Specular Decay	Defines the rate at which primary specularity decays outward.

Secondary Highlight

Color	The color of the secondary specular highlight.
Weight	Specifies the blend weight for the secondary specular color.
Specular Decay	Defines the rate at which secondary specularity decays outward.

Glazing

Enables a glazed surface effect by setting a threshold on the primary specular highlight. This option makes the surface appear more polished and shiny. To create the effect of a new sportscar with a highly waxed finish, turn Glazing on. For the look of an old, beat-up car, turn Glazing off.

Flakes

Reflectivity	The color of the reflective flakes, which is generally white.
Color Weight	A multiplier for the above color.
Raytraced Reflection	Defines the amount of ray traced reflection in the flakes, which allows glittery reflections of an HDRI environment, for example. The value of 0.0 turns the effect off. The effect should generally be very subtle and a value of 0.1 is often enough. The final intensity of the reflections also depends on the reflectivity color and the color weight.
Specularity	Sets the specular exponent for the flakes.
Decay Distance	Since flakes are inherently small, they can easily introduce rendering artifacts if their visual density becomes significantly smaller than a pixel. The flakes furthest from the camera may cause flicker in animation, or trigger unnecessary oversampling and long render times. To avoid this potential problem, set a distance at which the influence of reflective flakes fades out. Positive values reduce the Color Weight so that it reaches 0.0 at Decay Distance. A value of 0.0 disables any decay.

Advanced

Overall Shader Effect

Global Effect

Allows you to globally tune the entire diffuse, metallic flakes, and specular subsystems. It does not affect reflections or dirt.

Indirect Lighting

Global Weight

Modifies the influence of indirect light (photons and final gathering) on the object’s surface. It is internally divided by PI. For example, a value of 1.0 means the standard 1.0/PI weight.

Render Tree Usage

This surface shader can be used almost anywhere in a render tree. Although it is most commonly connected directly to a Material node’s Surface input (as well as Shadow and Photon), you can use any number or combination of surface shaders to control various parts of your effect. Surface shaders are often mixed (as the Base Color using a mixer shader) with textures to add realism to them. Also, you can use textures to control color inputs (such as Diffuse or Ambient) or scalar output nodes (such as gradients or fractals) to control refraction or translucency.

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