Background

This will discuss a little bit of the background material for the project.

As the focus of the project is on simulating paint mixing, a big part of the background involves, obviously, paint mixing models. A model that seems to be commonly used (and the one that I expect I shall be using in this project) is the Kubelka-Munk model. I've found a few theses and other papers (I will try to remember to post some references later) that use this model for simulating paint mixing and we also talked about it briefly in class.

A big requirement for the Kubelka-Munk model (or any other, I exepct) is that one has to measure paint reflectance data in order to calculate the parameters used by the model. I am hoping to avoid having to do the measurements myself (as they're bound to be tedious), but finding available reflectance data on paints is like looking for a needle in a haystack - this is my first real frustration/stumbling block in this project.

Despite this, I do think I have a lead on some paint reflectance data. It's also worth noting that I don't need real data to get started on the Kubelka-Munk implementation. I expect it should be possible to generate some made-up data or substitute data from a different source (such as the Munsell paint samples, which are available) in order to get the simulation up and running and then plug-in the actual paint data when I obtain it - the principles should be the same either way. So this is what I plan to until I've managed to finalize my data source for paint reflectance data.

My next step is to create some display/mixing tests to show Kubelka-Munk in action.