HOW CAN I CREATE A CAR PAINT MATERIAL IN BLENDER?
I will show you a really simple and powerful way to create a car paint material in Blender, using few nodes and without textures or other external elements. The key element that helps us to achieve realism is always the study of real-world materials. So when I start a new project, I create the model and then I create all the different material, studying all the properties that they have in the real world (roughness, transparency, reflectivity, glossiness etc) in order to recreate it in the 3D space.
First of all we have to select the object to which we want to assign the material (in this case I selected the main body of the car), and create a new material ID. Once we have done this, we can go to the Node Editor panel and add these elements: the Fresnel input, two Glossy BSDF shaders, a Mix shader and of course the Material
Output. After we have done this, we can start to connect all of the elements. First of all, we have to connect the Fresnel input to the Mix shader, and connect the two Glossy BSDF shaders to the same Mix shader. Finally, we need to connect the Mix shader to the Material Output.
Once we finished connecting all the elements, we have to fix all the different values of the material. For the Fresnel IOR, set a value of 1.450 (this is the default value). After, we can set a Roughness value between 0.150 and 0.350 in the first Glossy BSDF shader, and a value between 0.001 and 0.015 in the second Glossy BSDF shader. In any case, you can change all of these values as you prefer, achieving a new effect. These are the main elements of this material, but if we want to achieve a more realistic result, we can add dirt, scratches and other imperfections using some textures. For instance, something that can add a good touch to the paint is the use of the Noise texture (you can find it by default in Blender) and link it to the Roughness of the Glossy shader. Now that we have finished we can continue to set the scene, the lights and all the other elements to complete our project.
EXPERT TIP COLOURS
You can set the colour of the car paint in the Color input of the Glossy BSDF. Here you can even add a Color Ramp to create different shades; for this car’s paint I used some shades of orange.