Glittery paint

[Pepster3D]

Is it possible to make a glitter type material in Keyshot?  This attached one was done in 3DS Max.  Was wondering if there was a certain way to alter the metallic car paint or something to achieve this look?   Basically really big flakes with not much of a clear coat.

[DriesV]

Hi Darlene,

Currently I see no other way than to duplicate your geometry and scale it out by a tiny amount (0.002 or so...).
Then you apply a 'base coat' material to your original geometry. This material is where the glitters are glued/sprayed/... upon. Then -on the scaled geometry- you apply a reflective material and use a closely matching specular and opacity map to control specular amount and 'glitter stencil' respectively.

I attached a sample scene where I applied this method.
Admittedly, the included maps are identical and a bit crude. Ideally the opacity map should be halftone B/W and tiling can be improved...

DOWNLOAD ksp

Dries

[DriesV]

Adding a bump map on the glitter material and enabling bloom is quite effective too.

Dries

[DriesV]

Just put a IES light behind the glitter ball and placed a plane in the background.
Yellow speckles are reflective caustics from the glitter material.

Render straight from KeyShot.
Just showing some possible uses for this material...

Dries

[TpwUK]

You have way too much spare time on your hands Dries, but I am glad for it

Martin

[Pepster3D]

Sorry for the delayed response.  Wow Dries, that looks really cool!  Very interesting the way you set it up.  Thanks so much for sharing!  I've attached a test render I did and the file.  This is what I got from playing around with the metallic car paint shader.  Yours looks cooler! 

[Pepster3D]

P.S. Dries-was that specular map done in Photoshop with like a Crystalize filter or something?  It works very well.

[DriesV]

Darlene,

Since that download link in my previous post I optimized my textures a bit. You can download an updated scene here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw6BI0tv_sN8R2o0cXkwamJTa3M/edit?usp=sharing
The attached image is a screenshot from that scene.

As for the textures:
I started out by applying a noise filter (uniform, monochromatic) to a white layer. Then indeed I applied a crystallize filter on the noise.
Then I desaturated and inverted the layer. The result should be a single layer with white to grey flakes on a mostly black background.
I used this as the specular map.

For the opacity map I applied a treshold adjustment layer to the specular map and flattened to a single layer.

The bump map was derived from the opacity map. I copied the opacity layer into a layer mask and Ctrl-clicked the mask to define a selection for the flakes that I filled with white on a new layer. I also added a black background layer. Finally I applied a layer effect (internal glow) to the flakes layer to create a falloff for the flake bump slopes.

Dries

[Pepster3D]

Wow, really really nice!!! I bet you render a mean automobile. 

Thank you so much for sharing!