It looked like the diffuse map was too dark. So I needed to adjust the brightness of the composite texture, add an output node, and set the output amount to 1.5 (Fig.30).


Fig.31 shows the final ground shader.


You can see the white light, which doesn't look good. But thanks to the camera angle, it wasn't a problem at all. In fact, when I tested my scene, I ended up adjusting these parameters again and again. If you want a good result, patience is your partner. So, be patient please.

Car Paint

Before I get into what I did in the software, I'm going to talk a little about real car paint. There are many kinds of car paint in this world, but the basic ones are always non-metallic paint (Fig.32) and metallic paint (Fig.33).



Metallic paint is a multilayer material, which has two layers at least. For a high-quality result, you can create a complex shader, maybe three or four layers. At the bottom of the metallic paint, there's a glossy paint, and it decides which color the car is, like blue or red. At the top of the metallic paint, it's a thin, glazed and colorless paint; the beautiful reflection of a Ferrari comes from this part.

There are two special characteristics of the metallic paint:

• Multi-specular. The specular of the bottom part is bigger than the top part, so it will be very beautiful and charming under a powerful illumination (as shown on the tail of Fig.33).
• Flakes. There are many metal flakes in the bottom paint, which will flicker around the highlights.

In most projects, the key point of a metallic paint shader is the multi-specular (Fig.34).