VRscans – Materials Cutting Workflow Hours

VRscans are render materials created with an innovative optical hardware and proprietary software technology developed by Chaos Group intended to change the way creative teams work with CG materials. Often indistinguishable from the original real-world materials, VRscans are created from physical data and can produce an exact digital replica of a physical material.

Unlike most other 3D materials, VRscans uses BTF (bidirectional texture functions) instead of BRDF approximations (such as Phong, Blinn, Ward, etc) to capture a materials true surface appearance, texture data, and its unique response to light. VRscans is a scanned, actual reflectance capture of thousands of images, every pixel of each knows how to react to light under any angle. The information collected by the scanner is then stored in a unique VRscans material format and rendered with V-Ray using the VRscans plugin.

VRscans are extremely easy to use too — you load them from your library just like any other material, adjust UV tiling automatically per the physical sample size and apply the VRscans material onto your object with a simple drag-and-drop.

How are the VRscans created?

VRscans is the result of years of research and prototyping. The idea for the technology was born by the need of one of our customer to render materials very realistically and make them into CG materials. Some real-world materials — to take fabrics as an example can be very complex with multiple layers, threads going in different directions and chameleon-like reaction to light, which makes them difficult to be recreated in 3D. Yet our customer had to do it.

To solve this challenge, the Chaos Group team developed a hardware scanning technology, which takes thousands of pictures of the real-world material illuminated by lights under different angles, capturing the way the material reacts to light. The software then takes the data and makes it into a seamless tillable, physical accurate material, ready for use in Maya and 3ds Max using the VRscans plugin.

The innovative scanning technology takes care of all calculations and once the material is scanned you don’t need to worry about workflow of texture maps and tweaking shader settings.

VRscans deliver physically accurate photoreal materials which are as close to the real sample as a photograph. Working with VRscans you no longer worry about the material and you can focus on lighting, camera position and composition. Every time you change the camera position or lighting, the VRscan will behave accurately.

What does this mean to 3D artists and companies?

• VRscans simplify drastically the shading workflow by providing photoreal and physically accurate 3D materials which are often indistinguishable from the original real-world materials.
• VRscans allow to standardize the representation of real-world materials for use in CG, print and web across different creative teams. VRscans are today’s most accurate reference point.

An excellent use case for VRscans is the automotive design where two studios often work independently on projects aiming for the exact same representation of a car without having a reference point for the materials used. One of the challenges these teams face is that they create independently of each other their own interpretations of a certain material and invest time and efforts until they reach a common version of their interpretations of the material.

What if both studios can use the same photoreal, physically accurate 3D reference material for the car paint, the leather for the seats or the wood for the elements in the interior? No iterations will be needed to create identic visualization of the material between the two teams. This is what VRscans does.

How can I turn my materials in .vrscans files?

Our team offers a scanning service, where we scans our customers’ real-world materials after evaluating if they are eligible for scan and we send back the ready-to-use files. Read more about the scanning service.

We’ve also created a growing library containing over 400 pre-scanned materials which ship with a purchase of the VRscans plug-in. There are several material categories: leather, wood, plastic and car paints. We’re working with manufacturers to bring in their materials as well. Check out some of the ready-to-use VRscans here.

The VRscans technology is excellent for recreating materials such as leather, fabrics, car paint and even translucent surfaces. Contact Chaos Group to request your 30-day free evaluation of VRscans.