I'm trying to achieve high-gloss car paint and it seems I'm not succeeding. Any suggestions? Specularity is set on 100, reflection on 15. Specularity is set to the same colour as diffusion and ambience. And what about the rest of the colouring? Suggestions, corrections, etc, welcome. BTW, this is Dudley's Chevy '57 for Poser, exported as an obj and imported into Bryce. The trunk needs smoothing out. Or maybe not. this is approximately the position and the orientation the car will have in the picture. And will have a light shining on it from front.

try to make the specular halo lighter.. That should give the gloss you're searching for. First time make it completely white and you'll find that you have way too much gloss... then slowly bring it down a little until it is where you want.

Maybe a higher reflection-setting and more metalicity? I've never really had problems with making car-paint, but I think my demands for car-paint are a little different than mine. What seems to help me to create great car-paint is to apply a procedureal texture to it with a very low frequency. Just enough to give an almost unnoticable gradient. A slightly different diffuse, ambient and specular color might also help.

Usually the specular colors are much lighter than the ambient color, but that also depends on the lighting of the scene.

"I think my demands for car-paint are a little different than mine" oops that should be: "I think my demands for car-paint are a little different than yours"

Up the reflection as you reduce the diffusion and as above make specularity lighter.

Have you got all your lights in the right positions? If not, set them up or you may have to tinker with the setting all over again. Lin

I have an abs fab red gloss that i stumbled upon. Send me an IM and I get it to you tonight when I get home.

Looks pretty shiny already but don't you also need something to reflect? Looks like you have one sun at about 45 degrees. The chrome and glass are reflecting nicely but none of your body panels are oriented to take advantage of it. Slap stones or brick on the ground and a few trees and see what happens to the render.

Electroglyph, you're absolutely right about the lights: just the default sun. But take a look at the area around the front left wheel now. I think that I'm quite close. And when I change everything in the final picture, the paint will still have the same qualities, no? Just like when you put a car in a different light. Incarnadine, thanks, I'm sending IM now.

I have a nice one but am not at my normal computer. I'll post a link in a few hours.

Attached Link: http://hinchu.tripod.com/tuts/specularity/

You can play with this tut and see if it helps.

Er, the page breaks: "An error occured while processing this directive."

I agree with Electroglyph. You really can't tell how the paint will look by just reflecting flat grey ground and sky. Try a texture on the ground just while you're tweaking your paint texture. Then you can have a better idea of how it will look in a scene when you get to the final render.

Just a hint: there won't be much texture in the finished picture. :-) I did put a texture on the ground plane, and the rendering time jumped from two minutes to eight. Put lights into headlights and it went to 30 minutes. Euw. I'm mildly dreading the final render. though it woun't be anything like Humorix's dragons. :-)

Actually, what Kylara said about the specular halo was true. If I want a shiny red I use a pink as the halo color that way it looks like the light is picking up some of the color of the paint below. If it's the same as the paint color the highlight gets lost in the rest of the surface color.