Can automotive color development go digital?

Axalta Coating Systems' Radovan Dimovski explains how realistic digital color rendering can cut physical samples, accelerate vehicle development and bring designers and engineers closer together – while revealing why the human eye remains impossible to replace.

Automotive design and development have moved decisively into the digital realm. Designers can assess proportions, surfaces and details on virtual vehicles long before physical prototypes exist, while engineering teams increasingly use simulation to validate everything from aerodynamics to manufacturing processes. Color, however, remains unusually physical. Paint samples, spray-out panels and the human eye continue to play a fundamental role in deciding whether a color works.

Coatings specialist and automotive color expert Axalta believes there is an opportunity to bring more of that process into the virtual world. Its Digital Color Rendering technology is designed to give designers a more realistic representation of how paint will behave across a vehicle's surfaces, taking into account geometry, lighting and viewing conditions.

CDN spoke with Axalta's Radovan Dimovski about what digital color development can offer designers, whether it could reduce the industry's reliance on physical samples and where AI might take the technology next.

Car Design News: Automotive color development has traditionally been a very physical process. Given what is changing in vehicle development, is this the right time to bring more of that process into the digital environment?

Radovan Dimovski: Vehicle development has become increasingly digital across all key OEM departments. OEMs are designing, engineering and validating vehicles in virtual environments much earlier in the development cycle than ever before, and digital tools are helping to reshape the design process and improve efficiency through increasingly sophisticated visualisation.

With Axalta's Digital Color Rendering technology, designers can develop a much more realistic understanding of a vehicle's potential final appearance by visualising the interaction between color, light, environment and the vehicle's geometry

Color development, however, has not fully kept pace with this shift. There are already excellent tools for color analysis, from spectrophotometers, gloss meters and DOI tools to multi-angle instruments and other data-based techniques. But human perception remains essential to the color design and validation process. Ultimately, the human eye is still one of the most important tools we have.

CDN: What does digital color rendering allow a designer to understand about a color on a vehicle that they couldn't see from a conventional digital color representation?

RD: Automotive decorative coatings are developed using increasingly sophisticated materials and coating systems, but traditional digital color representations often amount to little more than a flat color swatch on a screen.

Digital color development allows teams to evaluate, compare and refine color concepts virtually before committing resources to physical samples

A vehicle is a highly complex geometric canvas. The perception of color changes depending on the shape of the vehicle, its surface curvature, the lighting conditions and the angle from which it is viewed.

With Axalta's Digital Color Rendering technology, designers can develop a much more realistic understanding of a vehicle's potential final appearance by visualising the interaction between color, light, environment and the vehicle's geometry.

There are still characteristics such as sparkle, flop, depth and reflections that mean designers need to physically evaluate color under different lighting conditions and in different environments to fully understand how it comes alive. Digital rendering is therefore not about eliminating physical evaluation, but allowing designers to make better-informed decisions before reaching that stage.

CDN: How can digital color development help OEMs reduce physical samples and iterations, and what could that mean in terms of development time, cost and sustainability?

RD: Digital color development allows teams to evaluate, compare and refine color concepts virtually before committing resources to physical samples. OEMs can narrow down their options much more efficiently in the digital environment and reserve physical validation for the most promising candidates.

Axalta also supports the full development process with teams working alongside OEM designers, materials engineers and manufacturing teams

That can mean fewer development iterations, faster decision-making and reduced material consumption.

There is a sustainability benefit too. Reducing the number of physical panels that need to be produced can mean less paint usage, transportation and waste, contributing to a more resource-efficient development process.

The objective is to enable OEMs to make smarter decisions earlier in the program while maintaining confidence in the final color outcome.

CDN: Designers think about color creatively and emotionally, while engineering and production teams need it to be measurable and repeatable. How can Axalta's digital approach connect those two sides of the development process?

RD: Our digital color rendering technology provides a virtual display of color directly on the vehicle. Visualising a color on a specific body style helps designers establish whether it delivers the emotional qualities they are looking for and whether it fits the brand's vision.

But Axalta also supports the full development process with teams working alongside OEM designers, materials engineers and manufacturing teams. Designers can explore color creatively in realistic virtual environments while the underlying coating technologies are developed with production feasibility in mind.

That means creative decisions can be made using engineering-approved coating technologies from the beginning, helping to ensure that the colors designers fall in love with can ultimately be achieved on the production line.

Automotive color is ultimately a human experience

Bringing color development and manufacturability together earlier also creates a more collaborative process and can help accelerate development timelines while reducing the possibility of surprises or production delays later in a program.

CDN: Where do you see this ultimately going? Could digital color rendering eventually lead to digital validation or approval of automotive colors, and what role might technologies such as AI play in getting the industry there?

RD: The industry is moving towards a future in which digital tools play a much larger role in color development, evaluation and decision-making. AI has the potential to improve color modelling, effect-pigment prediction and accuracy, appearance matching and the correlation between digital outputs and real-world perception. Those developments could make the virtual representation of color progressively more sophisticated and useful throughout vehicle development.

However, we do not see digital validation replacing physical validation in the foreseeable future. Automotive color is ultimately a human experience. The nuances of a color's appearance create an emotional response, and the human eye remains the best measure of that.

The goal is therefore not to replace physical color development entirely, but to create a smarter process that combines the best of digital technology with human perception to create exceptional automotive color experiences.