Printing anisotropic appearance with magnetic flakes

Abstract

The ability to fabricate surfaces with fine control over bidirectional reflectance (BRDF) is a long-standing goal in appearance research, with applications in product design and manufacturing. We propose a technique that embeds magnetic flakes in a photo-cured resin, allowing the orientation distribution of those flakes to be controlled at printing time using a magnetic field. We show that time-varying magnetic fields allow us to control off-specular lobe direction, anisotropy, and lobe width, while using multiple spatial masks displayed by a UV projector allows for spatial variation. We demonstrate optical effects including bump maps: fat surfaces with spatially-varying specular lobe direction.