Material Appearance

3D printers are inherently limited in their ability to flawlessly reproduce the physical and visual material properties of a template. If the reproduction of the template is adjusted in such a way that physical flaws are minimized, this usually results in substantial perceptual errors due to the partly non-monotonous processing of complex physical signals by the human visual system.

For this reason, the 3D Printing Technology department of Fraunhofer IGD aims at minimizing the perceptual error between the template and the 3D print reproduction. This requires empirical modeling of the human visual system, for which Fraunhofer IGD conducts extensive psychophysical experiments relating to color, brightness, and translucency perception. Additionally, Fraunhofer IGD measures visual material properties, especially the bidirectional reflection and the light transport within a material. This information serves as input for the empirical perception models, which are then integrated in Cuttlefish in order to relocate errors to areas outside the range of human sensitivity.