Blend material in keyshot?

[AZS]

Hey guys! I am familiar with 3DS Max and Vray, and I just tried Keyshot. I have to say I'm amazed at its simplicity and usability.

The only feature I'm missing is the use of blend materials. I used to create car liveries with different layers of materials (metallic base with some chrome parts, and golden lines, and shiny stickers etc.). The question is, can I assign all these different materials to the same object? In 3DSMax I usually use the standard "Blend" material or "VrayBlendMtl" and I create layer masks for each of the materials.

In KeyShot the best way I found is to choose a base material for the object and add the different layers as labels, but I can't customize the labels, only the intensity of their reflections.

Do you have any workaround for this situation? Any help and suggestion would be appreciated.

[guest84672]

At this point in time this can't be done.

[AZS]

Thank you for the quick answer. Hopefully it will be included in one of the future releases. Anyways, keep up with the great job.

[Ryno]

There is a way you could achieve something similar (minus the proper gold). Firstly, the car needs to be fully UV mapped (the bodypanels, anyways). In KS, use a metallic base for the material. Then, apply a colour texture to it (the paintscheme, as a colour map). Everywhere the metallic colour is shown should be 100% transparent in this texture. Then, apply a specular map that is the exact same size/shape as the paintscheme colour texture. Use this to specify the reflectivity of the different elements in the paintscheme.

I haven't tried this myself yet, but that is the plan for some stuff that I'm going to be working on over the coming months. I want a base paint of metallic white, with some matte black paint and glossy elements. The white is the material, everything else is in the colour texture, and the matte black comes from the specular map.

Hope that made sense. Also hope this is how it works... I'd really like to give it a try myself but time is very limited right now.


[EDIT] I just gave this a very basic try and it works on materials with no clear coat. It seems this clear coat is applied overtop of the colour and specular channels. And it takes surface finishes from the base material, so using soft touch as a base doesn't work if you want gloss...