Stochastic flakes

[Metin Seven]

Hi,

I recently read about a novel material approach in the V-Ray renderer called stochastic flakes. The technique simulates small shiny flakes that are scattered across a surface. It works great for car paints, snow and similar glossy materials.

Looking at the impressive results the stochastic flakes go beyond some trickery with a specular texture. At the bottom of the V-Ray manual page about it there's a link to the paper they used as a reference.

Would be great to see this in Keyshot as well, for even more sparkling product shots than before.

[INNEO_MWo]

Hello Metin.

Did you ever played with the metallic paint material? https://luxion.atlassian.net/wiki/display/K6M/Metallic+Paint
Just look @ my attached .bip-file. I used this material and added some procedural textures in the different color channels.

(For car paints check the Axalta materials. You'll find more in the KeyShot cloud or https://www.keyshot.com/resources/downloads/materials/)

And my question is: What do "stochastic flakes" in V-Ray more and what should be the result look like?

hope that helps

[Metin Seven]

Hi MWo,

Many thanks for your feedback and examples, much appreciated.

Your material looks great. I don't know technical details about V-Ray's stochastic flakes material, but it's a new BRDF type that is friendly on resources such as memory consumption and computing time.

You can read more about it in this article.

Looking at the results there is some complex light scattering going on that exceeds a textured car paint material. Usually, textured car paint materials still have a clearly layered build-up with a sheen across the top. The stochastic flakes material adds an extra finish, with the reflective flakes being an active part of the surface calculation, creating advanced multi-angular blurry reflections and sparkling in the surface.

Best regards,

Metin

[INNEO_MWo]

That is very interesting. I've tweaked the material from my example and added a light source for glowing and caustics. If the animation is ready in a while, I'll upload the file as well.

Just check this material.

hope that helps a bit.

[Metin Seven]

Wow, that looks great, MWo, thanks a lot for sharing!

[INNEO_MWo]

Wow, that looks great, MWo, thanks a lot for sharing!

Thank you!

I've attached a zip file with a short animation (1 second) and the frame files.

[Metin Seven]

Cool, thanks again!