painted metal with mia material

[Jettatore]

Can you post a reference picture or two of exactly how you want it to look.

[wannabeArtist]

Here's one I've been looking at myself quite a bit: http://www.drivertuition.com/images/ap2.jpg
(http://www.drivertuition.com/images/ap2.jpg)

I did a quick search again, but that's actually the best picture I can find right now :)

[Jettatore]

Pretty simple then. Actually, the default values on the Arch shader almost work on there own...

Most importantly your going to need an environment to reflect. So from the render tab Edit > Edit Current Pass > Pass Shaders > Add > Environment then Inspect the newly added environment and pick your favorite HDRI image. You may set the Background slider to 0 if you don't actually want to see the picture in your background, then it will just show up in reflections.

From there, just pick out your color in the Arch shader, and maybe turn down the Diffuse weight to 0.76. You probably DON'T want the metal material checked because it's paint now, not bare metal but you can play with that. Turn down just a tad Facing Reflectivity. And that it for at least a good start.

Grab yourself a Fractal and plug it into a bumpmap generator and plug that into the orange Material Node's yellow bump input. On the fractal PPG set Bump Mapping to enable and you will adjust the depth of the bump from the fractal itself. I had to go down to 0.05. On the Advanced tab of the fractal you can adjust the scale of your bumps so that there are fewer bigger ones, or more smaller ones by setting the repeats. I went with 2,2,2.

And thats it. It's a pretty good start. Your reflected image or environment geometry, render settings your lighting and your car geo itself, along with tweaking the above shader as you see fit are what will give you the finishing touches.

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks a lot!

That really helped me to get started although I think I'm still missing something as the bump map doesn't seem to affect the material in the render. It's enabled and it does show up in the preview apple and looks great, just not in the real render.
So now I've got this done, it has a kind of plastic-feel to it :)

The geometry is not final and little knob thingy should off course be more like unpainted metal, but that's besides the point :)


http://i30.tinypic.com/2cxswwo.jpg

Another thing:

After I plugged in the environment and some random hdr image, some of the reflections turned from smooth to rather grainy. Is this because of the resolution of the hdr image? Do I need to match it somehow first?

[Jettatore]

Does your geometry have UV's? The bump won't show up without them.

[wannabeArtist]

Ah, off course, forgot that.

Now that I slapped a simple UV on it, the caliper looks much better :)

Thanks!

[Jettatore]

Glad it worked, any time. Try a higher resolution HDRI. If your using the render region tool, crank up the detail slider. If all else fails, try increasing the Glossy Sample slider on the Mia to at least 32 for final render quality. This slows things down as you go up and is unnessicary if your using full glossiness 1, but if your not, and your have a less glossy more grainy gloss setting, then you need to increase the samples.

[wannabeArtist]

Right,

High resolution hdr image fixed that graininess issue :)

There is still a lot of tweaking to do, off course but here's a shot of the wheel with some preliminary materials on. All from mia_material and I can't take credit for any of them as I pretty much got them from some great presets (excluding the caliper). That caliper still needs some tweaking but I got the idea now, from what you told, thanks again!

http://i25.tinypic.com/6pncxv.jpg

[Jettatore]

More than anything for the caliper, the color doesn't match the reference.

With the settings I described above, this is what my quick 5 minute test looked like.

If I was going to take it further I'd say that once I nailed down my UV's, I'd give the red color some random variation, by plugging in a map to replace the diffuse color swatch so it's not perfectly uniform. Then start painting in dust, chips and grease spots.

Your lighting is also probably a bit weird and while the rubber is looking decent that gold rim looks fairly unnatural. I'd delete all the lights in your scene and start with a single, spot light and get that set up nicely, then set up your Fill and Rim lights. You'll want shadows on, and a ground plain of some sort.

[wannabeArtist]

Well, it's all very preliminary still :)

But that test piece looks great, what did you use for projection? Cubic?

I seem to have some trouble getting the fractal map all over the caliper, but that might also be just invisible because of excessive shininess (too much facing reflectivity, I think).

Thanks for the advice!

[Jettatore]

I used cubic yes. Um, I would crank up the power of the fractal bump temporarily so that it's overly obvious. That will help you check your coverage, which is probably determined by your UV's. Your either going too need to use the new Unfold from 7.5, a combination of multiple projections, or some automatic algorithm (automatic never does a good job when it comes to painting your maps though).

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks,

I only have 7.01, so probably I'll try multiple projections then.

This got a little out of hands, but in a good way ;) Most of this is not really going to show in the renders I take from the entire car, but I think I have to experiment with this and make some fancier close ups on the wheel. Even though, that definitely means modeling more detail to the calipers :)

[Jettatore]

Yeah go nuts man, don't be afraid to make a mess or break things, it's always better the 2nd or the 10th time around and you'll learn how to fix things and work clean.

[wannabeArtist]

That's right :)

[eldee]

you might consider desaturating that red a bit, it's super hot right now... even for a ruby red caliper.

[ajcgi]

I was wanting to know how to do a material like this. Ironically I spent this morning applying arch materials to the project I'm on now. ;)

For texture projections, it's the kind of thing I'd blast through Roadkill myself.

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