Technical help on making a car paint more like a car paint?

PacoCasares

Hello guys, I an in the midst of creating a substance texture and I wanted to see if there is someone savy here that can guide me in the good direction. I am going to texture a whole lot of cars for work and the help would surely be really appreciated. I'll show how the texture looks like so far, what I need to replicate, and what would be ideal to look like.

Thanks for the help, I am hoping to learn a lot of substance designer in the coming days. I think its a brilliant masterpiece.

PS, is there perhaps a way to make this with anisotropy maps perhaps? I know best way around would be to create a shader that works better with this.

Jerc

Car paint surfaces are mainly defined by flakes in the paint. Happy to say that the next Painter build should come with a specific car paint shader to simulate dual tone car paint with flakes  

PacoCasares

That is wonderful Jerc, I must say you guys have mind blown me what you have done in the past year with Painter and Designer. Its definitely in my workflow now. I must ask however, the 5.3 demo of Designer where you show the hyper futuristic motorcycle you have a incredibly great looking texture with that shader, but I could not find it anywhere or any mention of it.

MartijndeRonde

PacoCasares said:

That is wonderful Jerc, I must say you guys have mind blown me what you have done in the past year with Painter and Designer. Its definitely in my workflow now. I must ask however, the 5.3 demo of Designer where you show the hyper futuristic motorcycle you have a incredibly great looking texture with that shader, but I could not find it anywhere or any mention of it.

this material u see here is a mdl texture, as far as i know you can only use it for rendering (iray/vray and stuff) and does painter not support this material maybe this video helps you out a bit ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_0_nYUri6w

StormyBA

I'm afraid the only ways you can create the complexities of car paint will be via a bespoke shader designed for the purpose. There are many small subtle effects that you need that you will just not be able to achieve out of box with substance although it does sound like something could be on the way! Thats exciting! 

Quick snap from my current project, this is a bespoke shader just for our car body work.

First off, "standard" car paints has two layers. The first is the painted colour, this has a pretty wide, rough spec but sitting on top of that you have a clear code, this need's its own spec values. Ie, you have two layers of spec and you cannot do that in substance as it stands. These values tent to just be exposed in the shader.

Colour wise these just need to be values you plug into the shader and not a texture that you plug in. Standard paint shaders will need base colour, Spec colour and fresnel colour. You can get some cool flick paint style setups with this where the colour of the car changes colour at different angles but it will also add depth to standard paint colours. 

First off there are very few textures plugged in to this, there is a speckle grey scale that repeats across the car for the speckle and there is a fine orange peel style normal map that blurs the cubemap - as i said previously the colour and the spec values are just chosen via colour wheels in the shader, in engine, rather then via plugging in textures. 

And lastly you want an awesome cubemap to finish off the look. 

So yea, you need some proper car tech to do it in engine rather then via substance "shaders" although substance is fine for creating your speckle map, normal map