Appearance eXchange Format (AxF)
The Digital Twin of A Physical Material
Design with Confidence and Communicate with Ease
AxF files provide a way to capture, store, edit, and communicate complex material characteristics using numerical data throughout the digital design workflow.
The Challenge
Capturing material appearance data in a single, editable, portable file format is an obstacle in the virtualization of products, especially when different formats are used in parallel. This poses an issue when consistency in appearance must be achieved. AxF is the first format designed for system-independent communication of digital appearance.
The Solution
AxF delivers a standardized format for communicating material appearance data. It is used with a variety of CAD, PLM, and 3D rendering solutions. AxF is used in product design, development, manufacturing, sales and marketing. It is an industry first, and is helping brands reduce cycle time, control cost and ensure consistency in color and appearance.
See it in action
The rendering of the material below is a composite of multiple maps (diffuse color, normal, specular color, roughness, Fresnel, anisotropic rotation, alpha, height, clear coat normal, etc) used to create photorealistic 3D images of complex materials.
Quartz Stone
1. Diffuse 2. Specular Color 3. Roughness 4. Normal
Houndstooth
1. Anisotropic Rotation 2. Diffuse 3. Normal 4. Roughness 5. Specular Color
Black, Large Grain Leather
1. Anisotropic Rotation 2. Diffuse 3. Normal 4. Roughness 5. Specular Color
Purple Forest Leather
1. Diffuse 2. Roughness 3. Specular Color 4. Normal
Red and Green Plaid
1. Roughness 2. Specular Color 3. Normal 4. Diffuse
Real World Integration
AxF is a vendor-neutral appearance format. It is scalable, ensuring efficient access for large data; and extensible, extensions can be defined without harming existing support in 3rd party applications.
Consistent and Accurate
An AxF file supports communication of optical characteristics that can be used with and combined in PANTORA. With more accurate material capture, stakeholders can make key decisions about color and material earlier and with confidence.
Store and Share
A standard way to store and share appearance data, including color, texture, gloss, refraction, transparency, special effects (sparkles) and reflection properties, across PLM, CAD, and state-of-the art rendering applications.
Quartz Stone
Houndstooth
Black, Large Grain Leather
Purple Forest Leather
Red and Green Plaid
Looking for more samples?
Additional AxF sample files can be found on our AxF Sample Library page. Each additional sample contains an AxF material, a sample rendering in a default environment and extra maps as noted for testing. Variations include SVBRDF, CarPaint, and BTF.
Explore More Samples
Pantora AxF Viewer
Pantora AxF Viewer allows users to visualize and swap 3D materials in a controlled scene with real-time rendering. No need to be an expert in computer graphics. Just drag-and-drop materials. Change the lighting to see how a material would look under different conditions. It is easy to use and it is free.
Get AxF ViewerApplications with AxF Support
Digital Materials and 3D Rendering Workflow with PANTORA
Our AxF Appearance solution starts with PANTORA. PANTORA enables an unmatched level of realism and efficiency in digital material capture and 3D design. With PANTORA, you can accurately and consistently share material appearance information across every step of the product development process to reduce design approval cycles, accelerate time to market, and reduce wasted materials and shipping of physical prototypes to create a more sustainable process.
Capture Physically Accurate Measurements to Create Digital Materials
Capturing exact appearance characteristics is critical to improving quality and speeding up time to market for products. With a variety of compatible measurement devices, PANTORA makes it easy to capture multiple types of materials and difficult-to-measure appearance characteristics, and create a digital material library.
The physically accurate appearance measurements mean that the digital material has the same optical properties of its physical counterpart under any lighting condition and in any scenario, enabling reuse of materials across multiple product lines and product variations.
Compatible Devices:
- MetaVue VS3200: When using MetaVue VS3200, AxF facilitates multi-spectral texture measurements at the pixel level, enabling users to simplify texture measurements.
- MA-T12: Using AxF with the MA-T12 equips users to visualize textured samples like flake texture and color flop.
- Ci7000 Series: AxF opens up capabilities with the Ci7000 benchtop series to capture transmission of color on translucent materials and reflection color on highly spectral materials.
