Creating the car paint material

Here we are at the core topic of this chapter: the car paint. There are plenty of different types of car paints. In our scene, we will try to reproduce a shiny paint with flakes. Many render engines have an integrated flakes feature, but Cycles still lacks this option. Something like this will probably be added in the future, but for now, we will see how to recreate this effect on our own.

Getting ready

For the creation of the car paint, we will be using a new Cycles feature called Open Shading Language (OSL). A particular way of creating shaders is by coding them. Such a technique is used for example by Pixar's RenderMan engine as well. While creating a material this way is harder due to the fact that knowledge of the Shading language is required, it also opens a wider range of possibilities. In this recipe, we will not be talking about writing a shader, but just how to use it in Cycles. On the Internet, we can already find several OSL shaders. So let...