Modeling and Rendering of a Mercedes S600by Ali Ismail, Jordan Web: www.aliismail.com

Just put a base material with it making most of the material and a subtle but needed another material or 2 to simulate blurry reflections layer. For this I used a shellac material, the first main slot is a simple fresnel reflecting material, the second slot is actually a blend material containing a blurry reflections material and a very blurry material (so its actually 3 materials together but you get the idea).

By blurry I mean less glossy material, a value of 1 glossiness will make a shiny surface, a value of 0 will generate an extremely blurry surface. You could generate glossy surfaces by using a bump map (actually tiny bumps on the surface make things glossy in the first place, the shape of the bumps will determine how the surface is blurred) but its faster and easier to just play with glossiness parameter. Here are the material settings…

One thing to mention is that my material is not colored since its black obviously but just changing the diffuse color at the main material and you will have any color you want, you can try putting different colors in the less glossy materials as well for different effects.

The other thing is that I didn't simulate the sparkling effect of metallic car paint flakes, the reason is that after observing and checking reference images I noticed that unless you are doing a very high res extreme close up image for a the car reflecting an HDRI or scene you can do without it, you can add another layer for it if you felt like it of course :)

I did a small trick of not increasing the subdivs of the reflection glossiness to give the surface just bit of grainy look. Here are car paint flakes in action reference images, don't forget that car paint different layers, flakes etc.. come in different variations, some have flip paint (cool paint which changes color depending on your viewing angle) and many more, but if you can understand how it works you can simply apply it all using blend, shellac materials and different falloff maps.

The above image is of a car Mirror flicker you can imagine how much close-up its

Rendering a Studio Style Render

The concept is really simple. Every rendering software has the ability to make objects generating GI, just make as much objects as you want and think of them as your light sources in your own studio.You can put standard lights instead of objects as well, but objects are usually easier to change shape, look and you can give them the same GI material or change each object properties separately, you can also make the same results using lights but I find it easier to do with objects since we are going to copy/duplicate them a lot.

One thing to mention that bigger objects will generate more GI than smaller ones by default in VRay, also objects lightning effect will decrease when its far and will increase when its close (Decay)