Smooth Painted Metal Textures?

[Steve555]

Hi

I'm modelling a cruise ship, and have large expanses of flat 'deck' areas that are white painted metal.
Although I've done a fair bit of metal texturing I've always been able to use dirt, AO, scratches, details and how those things interact with the spec/normal maps, to achieve good results.
In this case, though, it's large areas of flat, clean, white (or very light grey) painted surfaces that don't have any of those details. (Cruise liners tend to be kept clean and freshly painted), and I'm finding it hard to get the right look
Unfortunately, simple smooth colored textures with some overall specularity look very artificial, even though, ironically, in photo references, that's what the eye perceives.

On the other hand, I've found some procedural shaders in Max and C4d that look quite good when rendered, but they rely on heavy rendering/shader processing, and don't transfer well to baked bitmaps for use in game engine.

Can anyone suggest some approaches worth trying?

Thanks

Steve

[Benjammin]

You can still make use of Ambient occlusion - that has nothing to do with how dirty or clean a surface is. I'd suggest trying to get some nice subtle reflections with a cube map. No matter how clean or fresh a painted surface is, there are always variations - paint drips, fine scratches etc. You could try adding some subtle noise to your normal and spec maps to break up the flat areas, which would also create variation in reflections.

[Steve555]

Thanks, adding very light noise has definitely helped. Tried adding a cubemap, at first it looked a bit fake but in the end I found a blurry map of blues, whites and dark grey at low intensity sold it pretty well

[Steppenwolf]

If your engine supports it you can use a detail normal map to get the look right.

[Steve555]

Yep, a bit of noise detail has has really helped break it up