Two of the issues with replicating Pantone (or DuPont, Toyo, etc.) colors in 3D are color-management and shading.

Pantone specs include CMYK and RGB values for display on a computer screen, but that is only for color-managed display systems (otherwise you might be spec’ing colors that look good together on screen, but look like poop in print or wherever). Any Adobe product with Pantone color choosers is color-managed far enough that if you’ve calibrated the rest of the system (your monitor, your printer) you’ve got “wysiwyg within reason.”

Next is 3D shading. Unless your 3D app is specifically color-managed with certification from the color-provider, (they provided the tools or the library) you’re in for some hard work! Car companies do this already with Showcase and their own paint and finish palettes, but that’s somebody’s full time job!

The background is that 2D colors can be blended and shaded, but those are artistic decisions and require layering or mixing outside of the Pantone color wheel. If, say, you spec a Pantone spot color for print, and then overlay a gradient, your press operator (or software) will reject the Pantone color spec. Also, it is actually more difficult to get a solid expanse of a single color (such as a Pantone RGB equivalent) in a 3D rendering system where (phong, blinn, etc.) shading “pollutes” the color to show 3D shape, to say nothing of reflections and light colors. Toon shading and other effects get close, but in those cases the output would need to be color-managed to realize the benefit of a Pantone color spec, and historically most 3D systems don’t have that (since it is pretty much defeating the use of 3D in most cases outside of South Park).

Whew! So, there is hope, as Showcase supports color-managed input (from X-rite) but not Pantone specifically. If you wanted to, you could go through the mind-numbing excercise of transposing Pantone RGB values to Showcase materials (very tough, especially for plastics), or you can import a swatch library to the color chooser that has Pantone equivalents (not sure if this exists for Windows, but it does on the Mac which is a color-managed OS). But my biggest suggestion for spec’ing Pantone colors in Showcase would be to “eyeball it” based on your most frequently used environments (since they also change colors and shading) and provide a caveat about the accuracy…

Now that I think of it, it would be great if DuPont (or somebody) could create a library of their paint colors and some “color-accurate” environments…