Best way to imitate Pearlescent car paint?

Its difficult to capture the way car paint looks, especially something so complex like this. What would be the best approach for results like pics down below?


image

Im a rookie considering anything related in this department, but Im very sure ive seen a rough imitation of this on another persons car before, so I suppose it could be possible somehow.

Help would be extremely appreciated

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That’s really easy.

You can just create a texture for it. I mean, obviously you are going to have to 3D Model it, but just UV Unwrap the car model, export it to substance painter, and paint your car model, giving it a cool gradient such as the ones in the pictures.

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Thanks for the quick answer, will the colored shine on the car follow based on the angle true to the real life counterpart after wrapping and exporting? I dont wish to keep it stationary at one place

When you make the texture, only make the base texture, excluding any colors that are on the car that are from lighting such as the sun, street lights, etc.

Something like this would require a shader which Roblox doesn’t support besides out of the box shaders it provides.
You could use a texture, but it wouldn’t change via light sources.

Sorry, but this is out of the limits of Roblox. You would need some reallly inaccurate, expensive, and wonky hacks to get anything close to it.

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There is a trick I found when the forcefield material was released that achieves a similar(?) effect and currently seems consistent on all quality levels.

You need:

  • Part with base color.
  • Clone of Part in the same place with a different color, set to the ForceField material.

image

Here’s an example of this applied to a free model:

Here’s the same effect on quality level 1:

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as @sparker22 said, there isn’t really any way to do this without using any weird hacks, which won’t behave properly under lighting.

That being said, you can use the trick that @PeZsmistic used with the forcefield material, combined with a gradient/rainbow skybox, and reflectance on the car material. Obvious issue with that is that the skybox will look strange, but you can sort of get around that by using an inverted sphere mesh as a replacement for the sky. I wouldn’t recommend it though.

image
this is the result of using this method, I’ll link the file, you should definitely have a look at it, as the colors change in an extremely fascinating way when you move around the car. I’d also recommend trying out different skyboxes, such as rainbow ones, as by doing so you can increase the number of colours, and can get some extremely cool results

pearlescent car.rbxl (1.1 MB)

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This is one of the many strange results I managed to get by changing the skybox

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Thank you soooo much for the help! :partying_face: