Metallic paint appearance measurement and rendering

Humans recognize objects visually on the basis of material composition as well as shape. To acquire a certain level of photorealism, it is necessary to analyze, how the materials scatter the incident light. The key quantity for expressing the directional optical effect of materials on the incident radiance is the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). Our work is devoted to the BRDF measurements, in order to render the synthetic images, mostly of the metallic paints. We measured the spectral reflectance off multiple paint samples then used the measured data to fit the analytical BRDF model, in order to acquire its parameters. In this paper we describe the methodology of the image synthesis from measured data. Materials such as the metallic paints exhibit a sparkling effect caused by the metallic particles scattered within the paint volume. Our analysis of sparkling effect is based on the processing of the multiple photographs. Results of analysis and the measurements were incorporated into the rendering process of car paint