Virtual and Industrial Design of material Appearance – VIDA

Since the beginning of the industrial era, prototyping has been an important stage for manufacturers as a preliminary step before mass production. With the
rise of Computer Science and recent advances of intensive computation, industry is progressively shifting from tangible prototypes to fully numerical and
virtual prototypes, with the goal of reducing costs and time during the R\&D phase. Over recent years, the emergence of 3D printers has enabled virtual
prototyping methods to take into account, at an early stage, some degree of fabricability, especially regarding the shape of a manufactured object.
However, beyond its shape, predicting the final appearance of a virtual prototype remains a challenge of great importance in many domains (e.g.,
furniture, textile, architecture). The challenge resides mainly on the fact that the final appearance of an object is dependent on its shape, the
material(s) applied on its surface, as well as the viewing and lighting conditions.

The VIDA project aims at removing several scientific locks related to appearance prediction in the context of fabrication, by establishing a
framework for the direct and inverse design of material appearance for objects of complex shapes. Because the manufacturing processes are constantly
evolving, our goal is to establish a framework that is not tied up to a single fabrication stage. To provide a rich variety of possible appearances, we
target multi-layered materials. We will ensure that every step in our framework is validated by either predictive simulation and/or measurements of
the appearance. To illustrate the fabricability of our results, material samples as well as object samples will be fabricated locally or out-sourced to
Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne or Saint-Gobain Recherche, and their appearance will also be validated with specific devices developed at the
Institut d’Optique-LP2N.

VIDA has the ambition to connect three distinct fields: Computer Graphics, Instrumental Optics, and Fabrication. Consequently, VIDA will have an impact
in all industries (e.g., Material, Design, Luxury or Automotive) involving designing and manufacturing prototypes, because they have a large demand on virtual prototyping to reduce their costs and development time. For the long term, VIDA results could bring benefits to high-end users who will be given the possibility to print customized objects of desired shapes, thanks to the printing revolution, but who will also aspire to control the final appearance of such objects.

VIDA results will be disseminated to the scientific community and the industry. To the scientific community, we will disseminate our results in terms of
publications, open-source software, and measurement databases. To the manufacturing industry, we will disseminate all technology data (operational
parameters of the different machines) that are related to the fabrication of materials that could be transferred in order to file patents with industrial
partners. To the software industry, we will disseminate algorithms and methods that could be transferred to specialized companies producing rendering engines (e.g., The Foundry, Lumiscaphe). Finally, we intend to disseminate our
measurement devices by providing a service of measurement of appearances,
including fully certifying and validating shapes of objects.