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I have seen some really cheap looking metallic paints in the material section. I am looking for a more realistic material with the ability to edit the flake sizes and colors.
Any ideas?

If I'm not mistaken you will have to use normal map for flakes, Maxwell doesn't have such an option (vray does).

well, I've seen some materials (like lens reflectors) that use Normal Maps in Maxwell.

Is the material a layered Base color with a clear-coat and between these a image map or procedural for flakes?

I haven't done such material myself. That one from wizard with tweaking was enough for me.
I would make wizard material, duplicate base color layer, try to add flakes map there and mix it with opacity map in normal mode. But it's just guessing.

Hi jonnynitro,

I'm working on a few car shots for my folio.

One of the shots incorporate a car paint flake.
I'm still working on this, but this is where the shader is at the mo:

All done with Maxwell's procedurals.
You can edit the size and color of the flakes by tweaking the procedural size etc.

cheers,

Steve.

That is looking Sweet!
If you could help me with that I would appreciate it.

The best way is to dig in to the procedurals in Studio.

I started with assigning a black and white procedural in the Reflectance 0. That way you can see exactly what the procedural is doing.

Once you've got the right size and density, you can then start to tweak the colour and start to layer up the procedurals.

cheers,

Steve

You mean a "noise" procedural?

Just noticed the Wizard has a metallic Paint option.
Aggg!

It's hell learning a new program.

It wont do flakes though, You need to use a normal or bump map to do flakes.
I never finished the mat so its still a bit dodgy but for this image I applied a noise bump to the flakes section of the car paint wizard

Oh. That looks good.
I'm going to experiment tonight with that

Thanks for the tip.

That car paint looks really nice.

Did you use multiple maps on that?

Just one I think. It was a while ago but I think I only used a normal map of noise in the flakes layer. I may have applied noise to the roughness slot as well to simulate a bit of depth but I cannot remember for sure.
I can say for sure that it is pretty hard to avoid fireflies when using normal maps this way (look in the corners). For that reason it is better to use a well made bump map

Jules