Flakes layer
The flakes layer is particularly useful when you want to reproduce, for example, the effect of glittering paint of car paint type like on a car body.
The car paint type material is a multilayer material (diffuse, specular and flakes). The flakes layer is generated using the Flakes Layer Editor. To add a flakes layer, click Add Flakes Layer.
All flakes can have the same color, or follow a distribution given by a color palette available in the Flakes Color Editor 
. See the Multiple Colors parameter. Random variations of the same color are possible between the flakes via the L +/- (Luminance) or a +/- or b +/- (chrominance) parameters which define a standard deviation according to the Normal distribution.
Flakes can also vary in size thanks to the Size parameter. The Orientation is expressed in degree with variations via the standard deviation +/- of the Normal distribution.
The visibility of the flakes can be dimmed according to their angle which is defined by the combination of a depth value and the texture of the Normal distribution.
The Sides parameter defines the number of sides of a flake (from 3 to 8 sides): eg. triangle, square, octagon.
The Texture Size parameter sets the size of the texture in pixels.
The higher the texture size, the better the definition with longer generation time and more data to store.
The smaller the texture size, the less good is the definition with a short build time and less data to store. The greater the probability of seeing pattern repetitions of textures.
The Seed parameter is used to generate a different texture from the same parameters. To avoid the redundancy of a texture the Seed parameter randomly generates a new texture according to a value.
You have the option to generate a texture with glitter randomly distributed on the texture Flakes Distribution > Random or evenly distributed Flakes Distribution > Even. Choose the flakes distribution according to the result you want. For a more realistic rendering of the generated texture, the random distribution of flakes is recommended for a texture composed of a lot of flakes.
If you enable the Automatically update textures parameter, after each change to the flake texture settings, the layer will automatically update. If instead the box has not been checked, which is the case by default, it is necessary to click on this icon 
after each modification of the texture parameters.
The features available in the Reflexion Color, Fresnel, and Roughness accordion menus are described in their dedicated section.
The features in the Advanced accordion menu are explained in the specular layer section above in this chapter.