A simulation of multilayer thin-film interference for pearl material preproduction

Visual simulation using computer graphics and virtual reality has come to be used recently in the production process to enhance the quality of materials and products. In this paper, we propose a simulation of multilayer thin-film interference for pearl material preproduction such as cosmetic development. Pearls manifest a very specific optical phenomenon caused by the multilayer thin-film structure, and most people have a common sense that pearls have a own beauty. Therefore, the expected merits of the simulation are not negligible. The author of this paper have reported a method of modeling and visualizing perfect sphere pearls. For a construction of the simulation system for a preproduction, it is necessary to apply the visualizing method to free-form surface, and consider the changes of blurring and interference color due to view angle which was not mentioned in the earlier research. As the results, we implemented the pearl visual simulation method as a plug-ins material shader of 3D computer graphics software MAYA and generated high-quality pearl and free-form surface 3D images with optical properties similar to pearl.