Car Paint/Gloss/Shine + PBR

I’ve been reading over the threads and a bunch of the PBR materials (Marmoset and Allegorithmic), but one thing I don’t really get is how to apply that knowledge to create something I’d really like to use as a learning experiment: a good set of car paint shaders.

Can anyone particularly advise?

(Alternatively, if PBR isn’t good for this, that’s good information too). I was using the Car Paint PRO shaders in Unity 4.x and they haven’t been upgraded to support U5 yet, plus I’d like to learn how to get the effect across in new ways.

Car paint is not that simple. The specular/reflections are actually sort of layered.

What we used to do for pre-rendered CG was have a base semi-rough material, then duplicate the mesh and extrude it a bit and apply some sort of glass like material (to simulate the coating those paints have).

I’m not suggesting you do that in Unity though, I’m just explaining that Car paint is a bit outside the scope of the standard PBR shader.

Yeah, a clear coat pass is the ideal way of approaching it I think, but for the time being I was able to approximate something decent for an iron man car.

https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Screenshots/Screenshot%202015-01-17%2021.06.29.png?_subject_uid=331552759&w=AACtxIwlrxSiFzgRM9nwqxiV86AbYFXgF31NndL28kGtmQ (Substance Designer)
Dropbox (Unity)

Something definitely gets lost here. Also using HDR with any substance materials + bloom results in a pretty crazy light show of bugs.

I can’t see the first link, but I can see you’re not really using any cubemaps in your unity scene, try adding one near that car to see if that helps.

I was, the reflectivity of the surface was just super low. Here’s an updated shot:

Obviously it’s still not as visually interesting as a two-pass (paint + clear coat) shader could accomplish, but it’s a lot closer than I was at the beginning of the day.

Put the image in your Public folder so we can all see it.

There we go. I had no idea those weren’t publicly viewable, thanks.