most likely can be done by overlaying a pattern to mimic metallic fleck in the spec map of the vehicles. would require a very high res texture though, unless somebody has a better solution.
To have metallic paint you would need to have a specular map that simulates the little metal flakes facing all directions in the paint. One way to get around the large texture size is to use a small but detailed image (say 128x128), then repeat it multiple times over the body. This is how GTA IV simulated metallic paint on some of the vehicles. In terms of BeamNG, this would probably not work, as you would need to re-do the maps of all of the vehicle paint. Also, BeamNG's cars are mapped in such a way that the space on the texture is not relative to the surface area on the corresponding vehicle part, thus having a consistent metallic effect would be difficult. You could always just remap the vehicles yourself, make them compatable with the above techniques and release as a mod.
Nice idea , Rachmat ! But mapping those would be hard because there will be visible space between the textures so they would look ugly . Maybe the devs are still trying to implement this paint feature to the cars in game
Played around with the specular for 10 minutes and this were the results... Like Bakasan said, there is no way around huge textures with this method...I had to double the texture size and the flakes still appear too big....It's a pretty neat effect though...so I hope it'll be implemented at one point if possible
Interesting concept and would be cool to get working. Almost looks like the dynamic reflections are handling it right.
All you need for this to work properly is the implementation of second UV-sets, and being able to set them per map. You could then assign a 2nd specular map using the 2nd UVset on the regular body, meaning you can keep the original ambient occlusion bake and such. Would be extra nice if we could set the amount of tiling in the actual material files, so you don't have to keep re-exporting your stuff if you want to make the flakes slightly smaller/bigger...
I'd settle for just having a the option of a deeper sheen, or color-shift for that matter. NFS The Run tried the speckled textures and the results were... interesting. I ended up calling it the "bass boat" or "bug spatter" paint effect. Unless all games use speckled textures, rather than making the paint deeper and shinier, in which case all I've done here is show how little I know about how to games. Or if what I described above is the cheapo way to do a metallic paint, and the "deeper sheen" paint I described is called something else entirely in real life.
