At colormass we spent more than 6 years developing and perfecting our PBR scanning technology. When we say scanning we don't mean capturing a simple image: we mean capturing thousands of measurements on a sample to record the true physical nature of the material.
Customer story
Designtex compared multiple services by capturing the same materials to produce the same images with different scanning technologies. In the end, colormass’s technology outperformed capturing of physical properties and we feel honored that we were selected as CGI partner.
"Providing a holistic approach that seemed almost too good to be true, colormass proved itself to be the right partner – providing excellent technical capabilities in material capture, 3D rendering and visualization."
Kendall Todd, Senior Manager, Product Launch
Meet the colormass Material Scanner that is unmatched in realism and throughput.
At colormass we spent more than 6 years developing and perfecting our scanning technology. When we say scanning we don't mean capturing a simple image: we mean capturing thousands of measurements on a sample to record the true physical nature of the material.
This option is ideal for individual creators and companies who do not have a large volume of fabrics to scan.
If you’d like to scan your own materials but don’t require a scanner, you can send your samples directly to a colormass scanning station.
We have scanning stations in both Europe and the U.S., and you can choose the location that is most convenient for you to send your samples. Detailed instructions for sending samples can be found here: Sending Samples.
Once the scanning is done you would receive the final PBR maps and access to our Texture Editing Toolset if you want to tile the final scans.
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If you need to scan a large volume of materials, we can construct a custom colormass scanner at your location. The scanner can be tailored to fit your room dimensions, whether you require a compact setup or a larger scanning area (its size will match the scale of the area you typically need to scan).
This option is perfect for those who frequently need to scan large volumes of surfaces and require direct control over the scanning process.
Multiple scanners are already in operation in the U.S. (New York, Portland) and Europe (Berlin).
If you're interested in trying out the scanning quality with your own physical sample, please send a scanning request to the scanning-trial@colormass.com email address.
Detailed instructions for sending samples can be found here: Sending Samples.
You can read more about the scanning process here: Scaning Process.
Check out this page if you would like to learn more about the exact steps of how texture scanning works. Starting from sending a material sample until having the final output.
Whether you have the scanner on site or send us the samples directly this page will give you a much better idea of the exact steps of how a texture is digitized with the colormass scanner.
Over the past six years, at colormass we have developed multiple versions of the scanner, with the current model being the 4th iteration.
In the US, we have built two of these advanced scanners for customers, who each scan and post process hundreds of surfaces every month.
Go over to our Documentation to download an example scan and also to read more about what the various maps stand for.
When you choose a scanner technology to digitize your fabrics/materials it is important to know that PBR material scanning is more a general term and when it comes to the quality of the final output these technologies can be quite different even if their name is the same.
They can be split into two categories based on how complex their capture and fitting algorithm is:
The first difference that is easy to see is simple scanning takes around 10-20 min to capture and generate a digital material while complex fitting can take up to 8-12 hours until the final digital material is captured and generated. More importantly the real difference is the quality of the final visuals, see a comparison below.
In the last 6 years, colormass has developed multiple versions of scanners, with the current one being the fourth iteration, while continuously refining its technology.
The scanner you see in the background was the Generation v3 (the version right before the current one). This scanner version still had a dome shape.
Below we created two images that showcase the difference between a simple and complex material digitization technology.
The first image is rendered by using a simple digitization technology (it is a flat image captured by a single camera from the top). It appears similar to the original sample in terms of color and pattern.
It only becomes apparent, when we look at the second image, that the first image lacks all sorts of reflection and geometric details that the original sample has. With the complex material digitization we record the true nature of the fabric so you don't have to worry about what details are missing from your fabric.
Even complex scanning technologies, like XRite - TAC7, are not able to handle samples that are larger than 20cm x 20cm. To our knowledge currently other than our proprietary scanner there is no complex svBRDF scanning technology out there that is capable of scanning materials of any size without tiling artifacts (like stretches or lines at the border of the scan). The colormass material scanner is the first on the market that can reliably scan complex material properties of large surfaces.
On the left image you can see an example where the properties were scanned correctly but the pattern was not recorded perfectly along the repeatable pattern so you can see that the pattern is not seamless, there are cuts on the front and on the side of the sofa. On the right image you can see our smart tiling technology in action: where the pattern is perfectly seamless.
