Composition-driven paint design

Formula II option offers a powerful bi-directional paint design environment: it associates paint appearance and composition allowing the user to control either of them. Previous section demonstrated appearance driven paint design scheme which is expected to be used predominantly by the artist designer who neither wants to think in terms of paint composition (flakes, pigments, etc.) or to be bothered with them at all. In this section we demonstrate the opposite direction of paint design: visual simulation of paint appearance for a given composition.

The paint manufacturer is provided with the means to simulate and visually investigate the effects of various paint compositions before actual paint fabrication. Formula II operates with physical (composition) model of a paint shown schematically in the right part of Fig. 3.1.

Fig. 3.1. A scheme of bi-directional paint design. The scheme demonstrates the approximate relations between the appearance attributes and the composition parameters of a two-layer paint.