Ok, I'm putting together this tutorial. Basically, it's going to show you how to achieve really terrific results, but will hopefully speed up your renders too!
The traditional way to get lovely, clean and non-pixelated gradient reflections is to have lots of light planes in the scene which are reflected back into the camera via the car. This is easy to set up, but will slow down your renders, especially as we add GI, area shadows and raytrace antialiasing etc...
What we will do is build our own environment map. A map which we will be able to save into our material library and forever use with any object.
Now, the downside to this is that environment maps have to be massive in resolution to get a realistic result, even with HDRI. They ultimately, look pixelated even with supersampling on. And compared to all of our lovely, highly meshsmoothed models, look crap.
However, what we're going to do, is use Max materials that are fractal or number/vector based. Not bitmaps. We will even get our environment map to look like a HDRI file and no matter how high res we render at, it will be fast and reveal no pixelisation.
The second half of the tutorial will be dedicated to getting a really high-end paint material.
Ok, first things first. Start with a new scene in max. (I guess this method may be used in other applications). DO NOT USE AN EXISTING SCENE WITH A MODEL IN IT AND LOTS OF TEXTURES. We will incorperate the environment map into that later.
Create a Teapot, give it 15 or so segments for the mesh.
Open the material editor, don't drag a material onto the teapot yet.
Select the first material (01- Default).
Click on the "Get Material Button" (The blue sphere with the arrow) so that the Material/Map Browser appears. Scroll down and double click "Gradient Ramp".
The gradient map will appear in your Material Editor in the top-left corner. Close the Material/Map browser.
A Few things to do:
Rename the gradient (Map #1) To "Horizon"
Change it from a Texture to an Environ with Spherical Environment
Change the "W" Angle to 90.0
Your Material Editor should look like the attached image.
We are going to edit the gradient ramp so that it looks like, you guessed it, a horizon.
Firstly, we need the horizon to be exactly half way. So on the midway colour slider, change the colour to black HSV=(0,0,0) (Hue, Saturation, Value). Create a new point to the right of it, somewhere in the 50's and change its colour to something like HSV=(133,60,62) a light, unsaturated cyan blue. Now drag that colour point to position 50, right ontop of the original black one. You will get a Hard colour line from black to blue.
Next click a new colour point midway toward the sky, at about position 70. Change its colour to HSV=(159,104,108) a dark, mid blue.
Then change the uppermost colour point (far right position 100) to black.
Followed by changing the far left (position 0) to HSV=(0,0,50). This will act as the ground. We do not want it reflect no light. That would not look realistic.
See the attachment to see what the Material Editor should look like.
EDIT: Don't reply yet guys lol You will make it hard to follow!
A sky with a little haze/clouds looks better than a clear sky. So we'll add some!
Righ-click on the colour tab at position 70 (The darker blue one) and click edit properties.
Rename Flag #5 to "Clouds"
Click on Texture and select "Noise"
You will see some clouds appear. They will look a little shit, so we will refine the noise submap.
Rename Map # 2 to read "Cloud Noise".
Double click on our environment map preview box in the Material Editor so that we have got a larger preview render. Move it to the side so we can see what is happening as we work on the clouds.
Firstly, we need to change the colours. This is very important. They must be very subtle and not contrast too much.
So, in the Noise parameters...
Change Color #1 to HSV=(159,104,108) "Our original dark blue colour."
Change Color #2 to HSV=(159,60,150) - a lighter, less saturated blue.
Change the Levels to 5. (We will need this when rendering large)
And Finally, change Size to 50. You might think that the size is too large, but don't forget that within our render window of the "Cloud Noise" we can only see probably 10% of a 360degree image as it is a spherical environment.
Ok, I will go through this quickly, as wee've already done these steps before with the horizon gradient ramp.
Change to Environ (Spherical)
Far left colour point, position 0, change to HSV=(0,0,30) near black
Middle colour point, position 50, change to HSV=(0,0,255) white
Far right colour point, position 100, change to HSV=(0,0,30) near black (must be same colour as position 0, so texture wraps without seam.)
Basically, we are creating an image to look like a low-exsposure photo.
Ok, Great. You've come this far, not much more to do. Except.....the magic!
Select Another material in the Material editor and drag it onto our teapot object. Rename the material "Paint". Give it a little specular and gloss. Something like 60spec and 15glos. Keep the shader as Blinn. No need to change.
Ok, go back to our Environment material. Click the "Go to parent" button a few times until we are in the Mask map. It should be named Horizon automatically. The submap should also be Horizon and the mask Map #4. If you want you can rename map #4 to something like "skylight mask". I am going to.
If you've renamed the map #4, make sure youclick the "go to parent" button.
We are going to pump some drugs into our environment. Click on the Square "Mask" button in the top-right so that we get the material/map browser.
Scroll down through it and double click on "Mask" and once more, make sure we Keep the old map as a submap.
Click on the None button and apply a mask map. In the material/map browser double click "Output".
In the Output dialog, We just need to change the RGB Level to 20.0. It will look bright, but don't worry.
Ok, In our Paint material, Click on the Square raytrace button and apply a mask to it, again Keep the submap!!! Click on the None button and choose falloff as the mask and select fresnel for falloff type. Of the two colours, we want the first to be not black but close to it, something like HSV=(0,0,30)
If you do a quick render it should look something like this...
That's basically it. For the environment map. You can now instance it onto all of your materials, save it into you material library for later use and hopefully tweek it a bit.
Think of all the things you can do with this method. Create stary skies, urban backdrops, psychodelic environments, like on the audi TT advert with all the Jimi Hendrix colours.
The material is slightly different to the one I used in my R8 render, just because I started from scratch for the purposes of the tutorial. But with a little changing of numbers here and there and a few more colour points, I am sure you can make this environment map something of your own and very individual.
Ahhh! What can I say? Really biig thanks, every ime, when i tryied to make a good car paint, i get frustrated. I use often Scanline, too.... Maybe some times Vray... But this here is great man! Should be a sticky. :buttrock:
P.S.: Here is my result after twaeking a bit, like my own wantings, added some fractal noise, variating some colours, bla bla bl, etc.
P.S ².: Do you use the same method for chrome mat's, aluminium and so on?
Edit: hmrmpf... its already a sticky... :buttrock:
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I use a very similar method myself, and also use the same map for a mat on the Skylight for tinting.
