Varnishing wood through the Clear Coat Shading Model

We’ve created plenty of materials so far—woods, metals, glasses, and so on—and thanks to that, I think that we can already say that we know how to tackle many of them. Despite that, not everything that we see in real life can be described as a single material, which is what we’ve focused on up until this point.

There are special cases where a surface behaves like there are several materials stacked on top of each other. An example of that would be varnished wood, the topic of this recipe. Said material can be described as the combination of a wooden surface and a thin layer of varnish painted on top of it. The properties of those two materials differ, and that shows when it comes to the way light interacts with them. Consequently, the final look of a surface that has that material applied to it can’t be described through the standard Shading Model we’ve been using thus far—we’...