Appearance-driven paint design

The paint design artist is provided with the opportunity to design a paint that can be manufactured along with all essential information necessary for its manufacturing, exclusively by manipulating the paint appearance attributes with immediate visual feedback. Naturally this virtual reality level visual feedback depends not only on paint appearance attributes but also on car shape and illumination environment which are essential in evaluation the performance of complex coatings being designed.

The main appearance attributes which are put under direct intuitive control of the paint designer are gloss, glitter and shade. The attribute glitter is actually a bunch of sub-attributes:

• spread
• sparkles (density, size, variation)
• intensity
• hue

Fig 2.1a. Appearance attributes.

Fig 2.1b. Glitter area is marked: sparkles are barely visible.

Fig 2.1c. Individual sparkles in glitter became visible.

What follows is a demonstration of the nature and control of each appearance attribute.