Real face-to-flop colour shift

Pearl is the first reflective substrate V3R has ever shipped with proper angular physics. Real pearl pigment is built from microscopic platelets that reflect light at different wavelengths depending on the angle they catch it at, which is why a Champagne pearl looks creamy gold dead-on and warm bronze when the substrate tilts away from you. A flat painted gradient with a fixed rainbow tint can never capture that — the colour has to actually shift with viewing angle, the way real pigment does.

V3R now models that directly. Two colours drive the effect — the Face Color you see at perpendicular viewing, and the Flop Color the substrate shifts toward as the viewing angle increases — interpolated by a Fresnel-driven pearl shader with separate Intensity and Flop Sharpness controls so you can tune the strength and the sharpness of the angular transition independently. Each pattern flake within the pearl texture also picks up a small per-flake colour shift, so the pearl reads as a constellation of individually-catching platelets rather than a smooth painted surface.

The substrate's Paper Color picker stays separate from face/flop, which matters more than it sounds: vibrant pearls like Stardream Crimson or Curious Skin Pearl rely on a saturated paper base showing through the pigment layer. Fix the paper as white and you can never simulate them properly. Three layers of colour — paper, face pigment, flop pigment — give you the full range of real-world pearl stocks.

Twelve named pearl presets, plus Custom

Pearl finishes from real paper merchants don't read as "adjust three sliders" — they read as named stocks the customer either knows or doesn't. V3R now ships with twelve presets covering the most-requested looks. Single-tone pearls — Crystal Pearl, Quartz Pearl, Ice Silver, Champagne, and Rose Pearl — for the classic understated stocks. Iridescent and aurora pearls — Mirage, Iridescent White-to-Pink, Iridescent White-to-Blue, Aurora Green-to-Gold, and Twilight Blue-to-Violet — for the genuinely flop-shifting jobs where the angular character is the whole point. Misty Rose and Antique Gold round out the set .

Pick a preset and face/flop/intensity/sharpness all snap to its calibrated values. Tweak any one of those four and the dropdown switches to Custom, so it's always honest about whether what you're seeing matches a named stock or is something you've personally dialled in. Custom states round-trip through Save as Default and named presets faithfully.

A pearl-native pattern texture

Foil pattern textures — Stardust, Hammered, Brushed, and the rest — are designed to read as decorative effects sitting on top of a foil surface. Pearl pigment behaves differently. The texture isn't applied to the pearl, it is the pearl, and it needs to capture the soft platelet behaviour that gives pearl finishes their authentic catch.

Pearl Grain is the pattern texture built for this. Soft elongated platelets with anisotropic light catch, designed to read as classic pearl pigment under any face/flop combination. The pattern dropdown is substrate-aware: pick a foil substrate and you'll see the foil texture list; pick pearlescent and the list switches to the pearl-native option, so the controls always match the substrate they're decorating.

CMYK and spot inks render with pearl character

A pearl substrate isn't just a backdrop — ink printed on pearl stock inherits the substrate's angular character through the pigment film. V3R's per-layer shader now mirrors the substrate-level pearl behaviour, so CMYK process colour, spot inks, and effect layers all pick up the face/flop shift and per-flake colour modulation when they sit on a pearl base. The previous build rendered ink layers as if they were on plain paper regardless of substrate, breaking the visual continuity of the simulation.

Diffraction without the substrate tint

Rainbow Holographic foil ships with a saturated substrate colour by default — gold, silver, copper — and the rainbow shimmer sits on top of that. Clear Rainbow is the other side of the same coin: a foil that drops the substrate colour entirely and lets only the diffraction peaks render. The result reads exactly as it does on a real holographic film catalogue — colourless where the angle is flat, jumping into vivid spectral colour where the surface catches the light.

The blending mode matters here. Real diffraction is additive — light from the holographic peaks adds to whatever is beneath, it doesn't sit on top of it as a coloured film. Clear Rainbow Foil now uses native additive blending throughout the live render and the captured PNG, so the rainbow peaks layer correctly over substrate colour, ink coverage, and lamination beneath them. A vibrancy slider above 1.0 lets the diffraction over-saturate for an extra-vivid pop, useful when the customer's brief calls for the loudest possible holographic effect.

An alternative flood layer

Clear Rainbow can also be added as a flood layer — the same diffraction physics applied across the full substrate, an alternative to Holographic Film for jobs where the customer wants a different visual character. Where Holographic Film reads as a smooth iridescent laminate, Clear Rainbow as a flood reads as something richer and more saturated, with deeper spectral peaks and a more pronounced colour shift as the substrate tilts. Same workflow as any flood layer — Full Coverage (Lamination) for an all-over film, or Ink Mask mode for film that only sticks where ink was printed.

Per-channel tone curves for every ink

V3R's factory inks are tuned against the Fogra 51 reference profile — accurate as a starting point, but every press in the field has its own colour signature. A Ricoh Pro C7500 sitting in one shop renders cyan slightly different from another C7500 across town, and both differ from a Xerox Iridesse on the next bench over. To make V3R's simulation match what a specific press actually produces, you need a way to nudge each channel independently — lift the midtone of magenta a touch, ease back yellow at the top end, drop black's shadow density a half a per cent.

Tone Curves do exactly that. Every ink channel — process CMYK, white, and every spot colour in the press configuration — carries its own dot-gain curve, edited through a familiar drag-the-anchor-points interface. Adjustments apply in real time to the live render and to captured PNGs, and curves are stored against the active press configuration, so they travel with the press rather than being attached to a single job.

The factory state is identity (no change) on every channel, so the simulation looks identical to previous releases until you actually edit a curve. When you do, V3R remembers — load a job tomorrow for the same press and the curves are still in place, doing their quiet job in the background.

Cyan accent stripes for grouped controls

Substrate Controls and per-layer foil panels both carry collapsible subsections — Foil Texture Patterns, Pearl Texture Patterns, 3D Raised Foil — which previously sat as ungrouped headers in the panel and tended to disappear into the surrounding sliders when expanded. Each of those subsections now carries a 2px cyan accent stripe down the left edge with a slightly tinted background and inset padding, reading clearly as a self-contained group of related controls rather than blending into the parent panel. The treatment is subtle on purpose — explicit enough to find at a glance, quiet enough not to compete with the actual content.

Rainbow controls — Frequency, Pattern Complexity, Vibrancy, Coverage Variation — get the same stripe when they appear, both on the Rainbow Holographic Foil substrate and on any per-layer foil set to Rainbow. Four sliders that only make sense together now visibly belong together.

At-a-glance active dots

A small cyan dot now sits beside the header label of each accented subsection whenever something inside is in active use. Pick a pattern in Foil Texture Patterns and the dot lights up. Set 3D Raised Foil's Raised Height above zero and that dot lights up too. Set either back to default and the dot disappears.

The dot is most useful when the section is collapsed. You can scan a foil layer's panel from top to bottom and immediately see which subsections are doing something without having to expand each one. The indicator also stays correct through Reset to Default and Factory Reset, so you always see the truth of the current state.

Surface Texture vs. Pattern

Foil layers have two genuinely different texture controls that were both labelled "Texture Strength" — a long-standing source of confusion. One drives the substrate's microscale surface character (matt-to-satin-to-glossy roughness), the other drives the amplitude of a decorative pattern picked from a dropdown (Stardust, Hammered, Pearl Grain, etc.). Both could be visible at the same time, with the same name, doing very different things.

That's now cleaned up. The always-visible surface character slider is now labelled Surface Texture, and the pattern section's three controls are Pattern Strength, Pattern Scale, and Pattern Direction. The section header itself is now Foil Texture Patterns (or Pearl Texture Patterns) — explicit about being a collection of patterns rather than a single texture. The vocabulary is now self-explanatory: surface character lives at the top level, pattern parameters live inside the patterns section.