Advanced digital reproduction of goniochromatic objects

The digital reproduction of materials has developed greatly over the past decades. The improved interactive rendering technology available nowadays enables broad digital visualization applications like gaming, cinema and film production, advertising, and online shopping. These recent advances in digital technologies are also playing an important role in the improvement of some industrial processes such as computer-aided design and manufacturing, virtual prototyping, and scientific visualization and simulation. Currently, many rendering software packages provide impressive images and often even claim photorealism. However, producing realistic appearance images is very challenging taking into account the high sensitivity of the human visual system. The visual appearance of products is still an important aspect to take into account even for the digital simulation of materials, since the appearance of these simulated products on the screen is still a critical parameter in the purchase decision of customers. During the last years different efforts have been carried out by industrial manufacturers in different applications, such as textile, cosmetic, automotive, etc., to provide attractive visual effects and new visual impressions of their products using, for instance, innovative effect pigments, also called goniochromatic pigments. The digital rendering of these pigments is a very active hot topic since this type of coatings changes considerably its visual attributes such as color and texture with the illumination/viewing geometry. Achieving accurate simulation of these materials demands an extra effort due to the physical complexity of their surfaces. Special BRDFs (bidirectional reflectance distribution functions) reflectance models are needed to characterize their visual appearance. This complex appearance is produced due to the presence of special effect pigments containing metallic, interference, or pearlescent pigments, which are responsible for the strong dependence of the color of these coatings on viewing and illumination directions. These pigments also exhibit visually complex texture effects such as sparkle and graininess. Under bright direct illumination conditions, such as sunlight, the flakes create a sparkling effect, while under diffuse illumination such as a cloudy sky, effect coatings create a salt and pepper appearance or a light/dark irregular pattern, which is usually referred to as graininess or coarseness. Two main issues limit the digital reproduction of effect pigments. The first issue is related to the current display technologies. The quality of the displays is an essential component toward accurate color reproduction of materials. Previous studies have evaluated the validity of available display technologies for the visualization and digital reproduction of effect pigments, which are usually not enough for the reproduction of such a wide variety of colors due to their limited color gamut. The second limitation is more related to the current rendering software. The color accuracy of their images is often not sufficient for the reproduction of colors and effects produced by these materials. The available rendering software provides impressive images that serve the needs for applications such as the cinema and games industries, but when it comes to more critical applications such as automotive design, the color accuracy of their rendered images is not accurate enough, especially for such complex materials such as effect pigments. The first issue is addressed in this thesis by, evaluating the performance of the new Quantum dots (QDs) display technology for the reproduction of effect pigments. For further improving the display capability, a new solution is given by developing a multi-primary display model based on the QDs technology (addressed in the first research article of this thesis in chapter 1). The proposed multi-primary display model provides an expanded color gamut, which guarantees a better reproduction of effect pigments. In a first step, the emission spectral radiance curves of the three RGB channels of a commercial QD display were fitted to a four-parameter function. From this modeling, it is possible to gain new theoretical color primaries by selecting new spectral peaks (cyan, yellow, magenta, and/or additional RGB primaries) and imposing colorimetric conditions for the resulting white of this proposed theoretical multi-primary display. Proper characterization to assess the performance of the display was conducted to know if the basic “gain-offset-gamma” (GOG) model can be used for direct and inverse color reproduction (from RGB to CIE-XYZ, and vice versa). The GOG model was found to well characterize this display. The spatial uniformity of the display was also evaluated in luminance and color chromaticity terms. Finally, with the primaries modeling and color characterization based on the GOG model, a 5-primary model (RGBYC) was tested. The evaluation of this theoretical RGBYC display model confirms the gamut enlargement, which can also improve goniochromatic color reproduction. In the second place, and focusing on the second issue, a big portion of the work of this thesis was dedicated to the development of a new 3D rendering tool for improved and accurate visualization of the complete appearance of effect coatings, including metallic effects, sparkle, and iridescence (addressed in the second and third research articles of this thesis in chapters 2 and 3). This task was carried on by firstly building a specific rendering framework for this purpose, using a multi-spectral and physically based rendering approach, and secondly, by validating the performance of this rendering framework through psychophysical tests. Spectral reflectance measurements and sparkle indices from a commercially available multi-angle spectrophotometer (BYK-mac i) were used together with a physically based approach, such as flake-based reflectance models, to efficiently implement the appearance reproduction from a small number of bidirectional measurement geometries. With this rendering framework, a virtual representation of a set of effect coating samples is reproduced on an iPad display, by simulating how these samples would be viewed inside a Byko-spectra effect light booth. Therefore, for this purpose, an accurate virtual representation of the Byko light booth was built using a physically based representation of global illumination. The rendering framework also accounts for the colorimetric specifications of the rendering display (iPad5) by applying the recent device-specific MDCIM model. The appearance fidelity of the rendering was validated through psychophysical methods. For this task, observers were asked to evaluate the most important visual attributes that directly affect the appearance of effect coatings, i.e., color, the angular dependence of color (color flop), and visual texture (sparkle and graininess). Observers were asked to directly compare the rendered samples with the real samples inside the Byko-spectra effect light booth. The visual validation was performed in three different steps. In the first study, the accuracy of rendering the color of solid samples is evaluated. In a second step, the accuracy of rendering the color flop of effect coatings is validated by conducting two separate visual tests, by using flat and curved samples respectively. In the third and last step, the digital reproduction of both color and texture of metallic samples is tested, by including texture effects in the rendering by using a sparkle visualization model. The parameters of the sparkle visualization model were optimized based on sparkle measurement data from the BYK-mac i instrument using a matrix-adjustment model. Results from the visual evaluations prove the high color accuracy of the developed rendering tool. In the first test, the visual acceptability of the rendering was 80%. This percentage is much better than what was found in a previous investigation using the default sRGB color encoding space. Results of the second study show an improved accuracy when curved samples were used (acceptability of 93% vs 80%). The final visual test shows high visual acceptability of the rendering at 90%. In conclusion, this thesis provides a method for accurate digital simulation of effect coatings, by developing a multispectral and physically based rendering approach on a simple iPad tablet computer. The research developed in this thesis comes with many advances in the scientific and industrial levels, with a great contribution to the development of innovative tools for digitization of materials, as needed in today’s society.This thesis was carried out under the financial assistance of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the pre-doctoral fellowship FPIBES-2016-077325, and the research projects DPI2015-65814-R and RTI2018-096000-B-I00