An abridged goniometer for material appearance measurements

Goniospectrophotometers and custom laboratory setups are used to perform BRDF measurements of materials. Those measurements can be used to improve the realism of previews of to be printed 3D objects, and for the accurate representation of real objects in synthetic images. Unfortunately, the expensive nature of those devices and the time required to measure each sample limit its use. This paper presents a cost-effective, fast, and scalable solution to capture material appearance. This technique is based on splitting the material information to capture into two main attributes: color and gloss. A spectrophotometer is used to capture the color of a material, and the raw data of a linear sensor used in a DOI-Gloss-Haze meter is used to obtain BRDF measurements, thus capturing the gloss appearance. Those measurements can later be used to approximate the parameters of analytical BRDF models. The technique is evaluated by comparing its results with high accuracy measurements of a goniospectrophotometer, and the approximations obtained with the high accuracy measurements. A good approximation was obtained when comparing the new technique to a goniospectrophotometer, except for a small underestimation of the peak of the specular lobe on high gloss materials and the limitation to capture the specular lobe width of broad specular lobes of low gloss materials.