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Brazil Advanced (Car Paint Shader):

The Brazil Advanced material is by far the most versatile of the new Brazil Materials. Not only does it function as a general purpose material, similar to the max raytrace material, but it also contains within it a number of other more specific shaders. As covered in the Brazil basics tutorial, there are the following shaders contained within the Brazil advanced material: Car Paint, Ghost, Glow Worm, Lambert, Oren-Nayar, Skin, Velvet and Wax. I'm going to go through the complicated ones one at a time, starting with the car paint shader.

Before that though, it's important to note that aside from these specific shaders, the Brazil advanced material functions pretty much like like the Max raytrace material, with a few exceptions. The glossy reflection stuff, which i described in the chrome tutorial, is present here, as is the glossy refraction, absorption, and dispersion that i mentioned in the glass material tut.

Under the Highlight Shader rollout, you can choose from a few different types of highlights, Phong, Blinn and Sheen. Phong and Blinn are standard stuff, but the Sheen is new here. Sheen, as a highlight, gives you an edge-lit type of brightening. This is the default with both the wax and skin shaders. There are also options here for how that highlight is applied, being Normal, Additive and Subtractive. With those things in mind, let's move on to the specifics of the car paint shader.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to stick talking about only wha we see in the rollout above, but note that everything up here is mappable by sticking maps in the appropriate slot below under the Texmap Manager rollout.

Basically, the carpaint shader gives you three colors to play with. These three colors control the overall look of the shader. Add on top of that the ability to add flakes of any color you like and nice fresnel-based reflections and you have the makings of a very nice car paint. The three colors i refer to are the color swatches for diffuse, falloff and candy.

Diffuse is the overall color of the material, as usual. Falloff is the color that the diffuse color changes to around the edges, and candy is the color that shows up in the brightly-lit area.

Shown above is how each of the three colors appears when it is set to red and the other two colors are set to black. By combining three different colors here, you can get some interesting color-shifting car paint, based on light direction or orientation to camera or both.

Now there are also a few controls available to adjust how these colors interact with each other. Starting from the top, there is a spinner for falloff amount. This controls how much of the falloff color you want to show. The range is from 0 to 1.

The candy color is based on lighting. The brightly lit areas will recieve the candy coloring, and dark areas will not. For controlling how the candy color is applied, there is the candy bias spinner. Also ranging from 0 to 1, this spinner controls how spread out the coloring is. This is similar to the highlight controls, allowing for a smaller or larger candy 'highlight'.

There is also a reflectivity color swatch and IOR spinner, in the reflectivity group of controls. For the car paint shader, you don't need to put a falloff map in the reflection slot to get reflections, you simply need to set this color swatch to a non-black color. Note that shades of grey will result in a less-intense reflection, but one that obeys the IOR in the spinner below. Shades of various colors will tint the reflections that color and white will give you standard full-strength reflections that obey the IOR below. This IOR works the same as if you had put a falloff map in the refelction slot, set it to fresnel, and then were adjusting the IOR there.

Next up is the flake section. The flakes stuff lets you put little flakes of any color in your car paint. They show up based on illumination (much like candy) and are great for simulating metallic paints.

First in the list of controls is the swatch for color. This is simply the color that the flakes will be. Next is the size spinner, which (as you might expect) determines the size of each 'flake'. You will notice that when you make the size fairly large, the 'flakes' are more like spots rather then little chips, as they would be in metallic paint. So, my recommendation would be to keep the size fairly small for realistic metallic paint, or you'll just have spotty paint ;)

THe next spinner, the Amount spinner, is simply the amount that the flakes show up. It ranges from 0 to 1 and at 0 the flakes are gone and at 1 they are fully visible.

The Bias control for the flakes is pretty much the same as the bias control for the candy. They both control how tightly the flakes/candy stay within the brightly lit area. A low setting keeps the flakes confined to the light hot spot, while a higher setting will spread them out over the entire surface, resulting in a very metallic look, although one that is very specular in nature.

Finally, the spread control acts as a sort of flake-number control. Lower settings (.01) will give you few flakes and alot of black, settings around .1-.3 will give you a more standard number of flakes for metallic-looking stuff, and higher settings (.5+) tend to create a large enough number of flakes that they tend to begin to blend together and cover the entire surface in the flake color.

That pretty much wraps up the Car Paint shader. Now, on to the Skin and Wax shaders:

>>>> Four down, three to go!! >>>>

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