I forgot to mention that I stumbled on the look of pearl by intentionally making the gel coat shader. The gel coat, being obvious in its construction, led to using two speculars and two reflects. I had hit on that before with the pearl shader, somewhat by accident, but I didn't really understand how to go from what I want to see to the values in the shader. That took considerable practice and experimentation.

Now I'm better prepared to create various effects intentionally. In the candy paint set, I've carefully chosen 50 colors that really bring out the effect. It's quite amazing to see these colors appear from setting just one color parameter value. At first it's a mystery why one color is so vibrant while another is not. That's why it's important that I prepared a bunch.

I built five versions of each, so there are 250 presets. There's Candy Paint (normal white base), Candy Silver (white metal base), Candy Gold (gold metal base), Candy Silver Blur (blurry silver base), and Crazy Paint (insane, but physically plausible settings on everything.)

In real life, one of these Crazy Paint jobs would cost around $15K.

The attached image shows Insignia Yellow Crazy Paint.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)