Car Paint

The 1958 Corvette I'll be modeling (hopefully soon) will be predominantly yellow (there's chrome, too, but that's a whole other challenge.) Below is a test to create photorealistic car paint. A few things of note: The sphere uses a Blinn shader and a Sampler Info utility (specfically, its Facing Ratio attribute) and a ramp (its color connected to the Blinn's specularity, and its alpha connected to the Blinn's reflectivity.) This is image based lighting - not with an HDRI as it should be, but with a single raw 2K image of the moon. This sequence was rendered in Mental Ray with Raytracing/Final Gather. As this is just a test, I didn't feel the need to go to all the trouble of creating an HDRI. While this is by no means a stellar result, it is a promising one; I'm considering lighting my car this way. Of course, there are so many ways to skin a cat and I guess 9 tries to get it right. You heard me, cat... Better run.