Blender Tutorial: Creating Realistic Procedural Car Paint Material
In this Blender tutorial, we will guide you through the process of creating a stunning, realistic procedural car paint material that can be applied to your vehicle models. This material will look impressive in both Cycles and other rendering engines, and it’s surprisingly easy to create. So, let’s dive right in!
Step 1: Adding a New Material
Begin by adding a new material to the chassis of your car. To do this, select your car’s chassis, then navigate to the Shader Editor. Click on the “New” button to create a new material.
By default, Blender adds two nodes: the Principled BSDF and the Material Output.
Step 2: Adjusting the Principled BSDF
To make our car paint look more like real paint, we’ll make some adjustments to the Principled BSDF node. Here are the changes you need to make:
- Increase the “Clearcoat” value to 2. This will add a glossy effect to the paint.
- Set the “Metallic” value to 0.85. Real car paint is non-metallic, so this value mimics that property.
- Decrease the “Roughness” to 0.1. This controls how rough or glossy the paint appears.
Step 3: Adding Sparkles
Now, let’s add those small sparkles that you often see in car paint. To achieve this effect, we’ll use a Voronoi texture. Here’s what you need to do:
- In the Shader Editor, press ‘Shift+A’ and search for “Voronoi Texture.”
- Connect the Voronoi Texture’s “Color” output to the “Base Color” input of the Principled BSDF.
- Adjust the scale of the Voronoi Texture to around 30. You can experiment with this value to achieve the desired sparkle density.
To maintain performance, we don’t need an excessively high scale value. Instead, we’ll adjust the texture coordinates and mapping. To access these shortcuts, ensure that the Node Wrangler add-on is activated in Blender’s preferences.
- Select the Voronoi Texture node and press ‘Ctrl+T’ to add the “Mapping” and “Texture Coordinate” nodes automatically.
- Connect the “Object” output of the “Texture Coordinate” node to the “Vector” input of the Voronoi Texture node.
Now, you should see those sparkling effects on the car paint.
Step 4: Control the Sparkles with a Color Ramp
To control the appearance of the sparkles, we’ll add a Color Ramp node:
- In the Shader Editor, press ‘Shift+A’ and search for “Color Ramp.”
- Place the Color Ramp node between the Voronoi Texture node and the Base Color input of the Principled BSDF.
- Adjust the handles on the Color Ramp to modify the appearance of the sparkles. Experiment with different positions and colors to achieve the desired effect.
Step 5: Add a Normal Map for Bumps
To give our paint surface some texture and depth, we’ll add a normal map:
- Shift+A to add a “Normal Map” node.
- Connect the output of the Normal Map node to the Normal input of the Principled BSDF.
- Next, we’ll need to create a normal map texture from our Voronoi texture. To do this, add a “Separate RGB” node and a “Combine RGB” node.
- Connect the Color output of the Voronoi Texture to the Separate RGB node.
- Connect the Red output of the Separate RGB node to the R input of the Combine RGB node. Do the same for the Green and Blue outputs.
- Connect the Color output of the Combine RGB node to the Height input of the Normal Map node.
- Adjust the strength of the Normal Map to your liking. A value of 0.1 should work well in most cases.
Step 6: Add a Warp Effect with Noise Texture
To add a subtle warp effect to the paint, making it look more realistic, we’ll use a Noise Texture:
- In the Shader Editor, press ‘Shift+A’ and search for “Noise Texture.”
- Place the Noise Texture node in your shader network.
- Connect the output of the Noise Texture to a “Bump” node.
- Connect the Normal output of the Bump node to the Normal input of the Principled BSDF.
- Adjust the scale of the Noise Texture to control the warp effect.
- To fine-tune the appearance, you can adjust the strength and distance values in the Bump node.
And there you have it! You’ve created a realistic procedural car paint material in Blender. This material will give your car models a stunning, lifelike finish that looks great in any rendering engine.
Feel free to experiment with the settings and colors to achieve your desired car paint style. If you have any questions or need further clarification, don’t hesitate to ask. Happy rendering!