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Towards Spatially Varying Gloss Reproduction for 3D Printing

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia), December 2020

Michal Piovarči, Michael Foshey, Vahid Babaei,
Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Wojciech Matusik, Piotr Didyk
The input to our system is a diffuse color and spatially-varying gloss. We first reproduce the color using commercial ink-jet printers (left halves). Next, as a post-processing step we use our custom printer to jet varnishes that match the input reflectance (right halves).
Abstract

3D printing technology is a powerful tool for manufacturing complex shapes with high-quality textures. Gloss, next to color and shape, is one of the most salient visual aspects of an object. Unfortunately, printing a wide range of spatially-varying gloss properties using state-of-the-art 3D printers is challenging as it relies on geometrical modifications to achieve the desired appearance. A common post-processing step is to apply off-the-shelf varnishes that modify the final gloss. The main difficulty in automating this process lies in the physical properties of the varnishes which owe their appearance to a high concentration of large particles and as such, they cannot be easily deposited with current 3D color printers. As a result, fine-grained control of gloss properties using today's 3D printing technologies is limited in terms of both spatial resolution and the range of achievable gloss. We address the above limitations and propose new printing hardware based on piezo-actuated needle valves capable of jetting highly viscous varnishes. Based on the new hardware setup, we present the complete pipeline for controlling the gloss of a given 2.5D object, from printer calibration, through material selection, to the manufacturing of models with spatially-varying reflectance. Furthermore, we discuss the potential integration with current 3D printing technology. Apart from being a viable solution for 3D printing, our method offers an additional and essential benefit of separating color and gloss fabrication which makes the process more flexible and enables high-quality color and gloss reproduction.
Paper
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Citation

Michal Piovarči, Michael Foshey, Vahid Babaei, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Wojciech Matusik, and Piotr Didyk.
"Towards Spatially Varying Gloss Reproduction for 3D Printing."
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia) 39(6), December 2020.

BibTeX

@article{Piovarči:2020:TSV,
   author = "Michal Piovar{\v c}i and Michael Foshey and Vahid Babaei and Szymon
      Rusinkiewicz and Wojciech Matusik and Piotr Didyk",
   title = "Towards Spatially Varying Gloss Reproduction for {3D} Printing",
   journal = "ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia)",
   year = "2020",
   month = dec,
   volume = "39",
   number = "6"
}