Real-time accurate rendering of color and texture of car coatings

The digital representation of three dimensional objects with different materials has become common not only in the games and movie industry, but also in designer software, e-commerce and other applications. Although the rendered images often seem to be realistic, a closer look reveals that their color accuracy is often insufficient for critical applications. Storage of the angledependent color properties of metallic coatings and other gonioapparent materials demands large amounts of data. Apart from that, also rendering sparkle, gloss and other visual texture phenomena is still a subject of active research. Current approaches are computationally very demanding, and require manual ad-hoc setting of many model parameters. In this paper, we describe a new approach to solve these problems. We combine a multi-spectral physics-based approach to make BRDF representation more efficient. We also account for the common loss in color accuracy due to the varying technical specifications of displays, and we correct for the influence from ambient lighting. The rendering framework presented here is shown to be capable of rendering sparkle and gloss as well, based on objective measurement of these properties. This takes out the subjective phase of manual fine-tuning of model parameters that is characteristic for many current rendering approaches. A feasibility test with the new spectral rendering pipeline shows that is indeed able to produce realistic rendering of color, sparkle, gloss and other texture aspects. The computation time is small enough to make the rendering real-time on an iPad 2017, i.e. with low memory footprint and without high demands on graphic card or data storage.