A Method for Fitting Measured Car Paints to a Game Engine's Rendering Model

Abstract

Car paints are visually complex materials that are of great importance for numerous real-time applications, including not only the game and movie industries but also virtual prototyping and design as well as advertisement. In addition to the creation of plausible materials by designers, more and more industrial effort is spent on capturing large databases of digitized materials. However, capturing complex reflectance characteristics of car paints involves the use of specialized, commercially available devices that come with predefined, standardized material formats. Using these digitized materials within other frameworks such as game engines is a challenging task due to the lacking compatibility of the involved rendering models. In this paper, we address these compatibility issues by fitting the available parameters of the game engine's material model to best match the appearance of the measured material.