X-Rite Pantone has released a new file format that allows the full communication of visual appearance in a single, editable file in order to improve the virtualisation process. Appearance Exchange Format (AxF) is vendor-neutral and provides a standard way to store and share appearance data - colour, texture, gloss, refraction, translucency, special effects (sparkles) and reflection properties - across product lifecycle management (PLM), computer-aided design (CAD), and art rendering applications.
“For a growing number of brands in industries, product appearance is a crucial element of the buying decision,” said Dr. Francis Lamy, executive VP and chief technology officer at X-Rite Pantone. “Appearance must, therefore, be an integral part of the design-to-production process and not just an afterthought. AxF makes this possible.”
The company said integration of real world materials has always been the missing link in virtual product design - traditionally, design teams have approximated the physical (optical) behavior of materials in digital tools through manual re-creation and editing. These representations are neither accurate nor able to be shared across the numerous design and rendering tools used at various stages of the workflow. AxF enables the creation of full-scale digital mock-ups featuring even sophisticated materials such as special-effects paints, leather, plastics, fabrics, wood, and brushed metals.
According to X-Rite, a number of PLM and CAD system providers are developing integration with AxF, which is able to compress raw data from terabytes to megabytes providing third party software applications with efficient access to a full set of material appearance characteristics without compromising performance.
- New from X-Rite and its subsidiary Pantone LLC is the Ci7860 benchtop sphere spectrophotometer.