In this tutorial I will show you how to build a Car paint shader in Maya. Though this tutorial is for Maya, you may use similar concepts in other packages as well. The terms may be different. To create a car paint shader we will be using a layered shader. There will be two layers in this shader, one for the color and the other for the reflections and highlights. Think of it in terms of a real car paint. You have a base color and on top of it a clear coat which adds the gloss to the paint

First off, open the Hypershade window (Windows -> Rendering Editors -> Hypershade). You will notice that by default you have three shaders in the Materials panel. These are the default Maya ones.

Under the create tab click on Lambert. This will create a new Lambert shader in the Materials tab and also under the workarea. The reason for choosing Lambert over Blinn is that we do not need any specular highlights. So instead of creating a Blinn and turning off specularity, I created a Lambert which does not have any specular highlights. Now double click on the “lambert2” shader in the work area or hit CTRL+A to open the Attribute Editor. First off rename the shader to something more meaningful, like “paint_color”. Remember assigning proper names to materials can save a lot of headache in the long run. So do it!

Download pdf Car Paint Shader in Maya