Part 3 - Car Shaders

In Mental Ray, shaders are a kind of holy stuff, they are everything and we are always looking for a perfect shader that will be able to help us solving our problems with illumination, texturing and even help us out with modeling.

There are some ready to use shaders that simulate metallic paintings, among them the great “Carpaint”, it works very well when we are trying to create our metallic objects with flakes and everything else that a metallic material has but at least for me it never worked to create a realistic and nice car rendering.

By the way there are some people that has this “skill” to create nice and photo-realistic car renders, among them I´d like to talk about two nice guys, the first one is who shared this backplate and this HDRI with us, looking at his site www.suurland.com we can see lots of nice renders but unfortunately I couldn’t find explanations about how they achieve those results, but there are always some good souls that wanna help us out and fortunately this good soul also has a great skill to create car renders in a photo-realistic way.


If you don’t know who I’m talking about, this person is Jeff Patton, if you watch his portfolio at jeffpatton.cgsociety.org you gonna see amazing car renders (the black Mercedes is a must see tho), he also keeps a blog where once a month (unfortunately, it could be at least twice a month) he’s always telling us about his knowledge with mental ray and sharing his shaders, so looking at his blog I found an amazing car paint shader that makes a nice render using a combination of some shaders from “mia” library more known as Arch&Design.

But as you already can imagine there’s no point into just start copying his materials and put it in our car, we must study it and see what we need to change in order to fit our needs


This shader by his own can give us a really nice render, but if we ask for 3ds max to render it now then we not gonna get a nice result, all arch&design shaders has an environment slot, and we could bring another instance of the HDRI and get our shaders reflecting it.

But this time we gonna do some changes to the white point of our HDRI, it must have lower values (with that we are going to see brighter areas on it). Look at the next screen shoot the differences between the HDRI configurations for our skylight and for the carpaint shader: