How to Streamline Automotive Product Design with Accurate Virtual Materials for 3D Rendering
Automotive brands must innovate and adopt digital processes to be better equipped to address consumer demands for unique colors and materials while also meeting industry demands for sustainability. However, industrial designers often struggle to create an accurate representation of how a new color or material will look on the final product, especially using complex materials and finishes. Creating a virtual prototype is a cost-effective and sustainable way to perform meaningful reviews and get stakeholder feedback.
Challenges
When presenting new colors, automotive designers struggle to achieve color accuracy in designs.
- Physical clay prototypes are expensive and time-consuming to produce.
- Color and appearance attributes can change based on surface shape and viewing conditions.
- Color inconsistencies lead to incorrect expectations.
- Creating and shipping prototypes restricts manufacturers on the number of color samples they can present.
- Coordinating with suppliers to obtain the correct materials and colors can lead to delays and tons of wasted materials.
- Iterations to match colors accurately on physical prototypes are time consuming and expensive.
Solution
To meet consumer needs and remain agile, automotive designers must bridge the gap between physical and digital prototypes. Instead of enlisting mills to fabricate clay prototypes to demonstrate how the material will appear on the final product, automotive designers can use the MA-T12 spectrophotometer and PANTORA desktop application to create a physically accurate virtual representation of both interior and exterior materials.
Powered by X-Rite’s AxF format, these virtual designs can be visualized within PANTORA and imported into third-party visualization and rendering tools for 3d simulation. This enables designers, product managers, engineers, manufacturers, and other key stakeholders to simulate and visualize the color, sparkle, and surface texture of complex coatings and leather samples on 3-dimensional forms and evaluate appearance under different lighting conditions. It also allows them to make quick changes based on stakeholder feedback.
Results
Creating a virtual prototype that goes beyond color to capture full material appearance is a fast, easy, and economical way to gain stakeholder buy-in.
- Reduce design iterations by 2-3 times.
- Visualize multiple components together to ensure part to part harmony.
- Specify and reuse materials through a digital material library.
- Save millions of dollars by reducing the need to create clay prototypes.
- Establish a spectral and texture data audit trail for formulation and production.
- Improve supplier and partner communication to streamline the design to production process.
How it Works
- The designer uses the MA-T12 spectrophotometer to measure the interior or exterior material sample. With the multi-angle measurement, it fully characterizes both color and special attributes like sparkle, coarseness, and texture.
- PANTORA locates, acquires, and imports these digital materials as AxF files, applies the material to arbitrary geometry, and renders it in real-time in a virtual scene for an immersive digital material evaluation experience under multiple lighting conditions.
- The designer sends the digital rendering to engineers, production managers, supply chain partners, and other stakeholders for review and approval through a third-party rendering solution or PLM system.
- These digital materials can be stored, managed, viewed, and edited in AxF from a centralized library for future designs and to create marketing materials.
Featured Products
A desktop application designed to simplify the management of a large volume of complex color and appearance data. It acts as the epicenter of appearance workflows, connecting digital material input sources with output designations such as third-party rendering software and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Systems.
With twelve angles of measurement and an on-board color calibrated RGB camera, the advanced MA-T12 multi-angle spectrophotometer can fully characterize and verify color, sparkle, coarseness, and texture characteristics with the highest level of repeatability and reproducibility, making it a superior measurement device for both interior and exterior parts.
Third Party Rendering Software
Renderings made using PANTORA can be viewed by brands and designers using AxF-enabled rendering software solutions. Visit our website for the most current list of vendors: https://www.xrite.com/axf.
PANTORA and MA-T12 offer a comprehensive solution to address the challenges faced by automotive designers. Together, they can streamline the design process, improve color accuracy, and enhance quality control, ultimately leading to faster and more efficient automotive design and production workflows. Learn more at https://www.xrite.com/pantora-software.
