Car Paint Shader Setupby



There are many ways to achieve an effective car paint simulation in 3D. Several companies have written high end shaders which give amazing results but most (not all) of them require fine tuning of a lot of settings to acheive a quality end result. Using Softimage XSI and a simple Phong shader combined with some basic render tree setup and the Mental Ray render engine will give professional results comparable to using a 3rd party car shader.

Start by selecting your car model and assign a Phong shader, Get Material / Phong and make sure to disable the specular. Open the render tree (7 on your keyboard) Next select Nodes / Mixers / Gradient and plug the output of the gradient node into the reflectivity of the phong.





Now select Nodes/ Illumination/ Incidence and plug the output of the Incidence Node into the input of the Gradient Node. Open the Incidence Node and check invert.

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