X-Rite Incorporated, a global leader in color science and technology, and its subsidiary Pantone LLC, have announced today that Luxion’s award-winning KeyShot software application natively supports the Appearance Exchange Format (AxF™).
Luxion Supports Vendor Neutral Format
Luxion’s KeyShot is a popular 3d rendering and animation software and it now supports AxF, enabling full communication of visual appearance data in a single, editable file to improve the design visualization process.
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“A primary differentiator and key feature of KeyShot is the ability to create high-quality visuals using scientifically accurate materials,” says Henrik Wann Jensen, chief scientist and co-founder, Luxion. “Along with the vast material capabilities in KeyShot, support for X-Rite’s AxF files format allows users to accurately and consistently represent the complex materials properties of their scanned textures for an endless number of materials, providing even greater realism in communicating their product visuals.”
KeyShot RenderWorld 2017
X-Rite will be showing off Luxion’s support for AxF integration with KeyShot at KeyShot RenderWorld 2017 later in May (15-16th) at the Pasea Hotel & Spa in Huntington Beach, California.
01 – A stunning sample of the accurate imagery possible in Luxion’s KeyShot with the new support for AxF format from the Pantone company. Image: courtesy of Luxion.
KeyShot RenderWorld 2017 attendees can see demos of X-Rite’s award-winning Total Appearance Capture (TAC™) ecosystem and the AxF integration with KeyShot at the X-Rite booth.
This is the second year Luxion has gathered KeyShot users from around the world to learn from other 3D professionals and this year’s event features keynote speaker Chip Foose, a look at KeyShot 7, and presentations by KeyShot users from Bose, Caterpillar, Sonos, Stanley Black & Decker, and others.
AxF and the TAC Ecosystem—What It Is
While AxF is a file data format, it is also apart of the Total Appearance Capture (TAC™) Ecosystem. This system is designed to capture, communicate and visualize colors of physical materials from end to end across a digital to physical creation pipeline.
02 – A picture of the TAC7 from X-Rite (the parent company of Pantone) which is a machine that captures exact appearance data of physical materials for use in digital material definition-based workflows. Image: courtesy, X-rite.
TAC7 is a physical material scanner for X-Rite’s TAC Ecosystem. It scans real physical material samples to produce highly accurate digital material definitions. Next, users use the PANTORA™ Material Hub, a software system connecting digital material input sources to output destinations. AxF (Appearance Exchange Format) is the file data format from TAC7 and sends that to the PANTORA Material Hub. As a vendor-neutral format, the color and material data are accessed through most major product lifecycle management (PLM) software systems.
Windows and Linux with Mac Coming
AxF is portable with an SDK (software development kit) available for Windows and Linux operating systems with a Mac SDK in the works currently.
AxF solves a very important limitation in virtualization processes: it both captures and manages visual appearance data in single, editable file format that is neutral across vendors and system independent. TAC7 scanners produce this data file natively and the data (AxF) is importable using new CAD rendering systems like Autodesk VRED (which Architosh has mentioned here before) and Nvidia Iray® (see here) with more planned. It is built on HDF5 and the payload and metadata can be encrypted separately.
Learning More
To learn more about KeyShot RenderWorld go here.
To learn more about X-Rite, which is the parent company of Pantone, go here.
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