A simple car paint material is easy to set up. V-ray comes with a fairly good material that is specifically designed for automotive paints. The shader is called VrayCarPaintMtl. It consists of 3 layers: base paint, metallic flakes, and clear coat.

carpaint_basic


Basic paint is pretty diffuse and the main color is defined by the Base Color Diffuse component. So, the Reflection level for Base is set low and the Glossiness is lowered to 0.5. This gives a fairly solid-looking paint.

For a simple, “standard” car paint, there is no need for the Flakes layer. We have reduced the Flake Density to 0, effectively turning this layer off. Only metallic paints have this effect.

The coat layer is supposed to be pretty glossy (which creates sharp reflections), so we set the glossiness to 0.98. Make sure Trace reflections is turned on for realistic results. You can play with the Coat strength to simulate the amount of polish/thickness of the clear coat, which can vary a bit between different cars. Still, you don’t want to overpower the base layer.

There is one more element that is essential for a realistic looking paint: the ‘orange peel’ effect in the Bump slot. Even polished, high-end paint jobs show this effect slightly. Cheaper, lower quality paint will have a stronger Bump.

orange_peal


It’s very easy to simulate this by putting a Noise map in the Bump slot and setting it to a very small size (always check to see if the noise size needs adjustment on your particular model).

Adding Swirls & Fingerprints

If the car is not freshly polished, it might benefit from a small amount of smudges/swirls on top of the paint coat.

carpaint_smudges


To set this up, we need a Blend material. Leave the basic paint as the Base layer and make a copy in the Coat slot. You can instance the Base color and Bump maps to make further color/Bump adjustments easier.
The second car paint layer should have the Coat Layer strength increased a bit, while the Glossiness should be lowered; leave everything else the same. Now we can give the material a slightly smudged look, by using different b&w maps in the Blend amount slot.

coat

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