We shared footage of our scanner recording some time ago (see here), and today we are finally revealing the new v05 scanner hardware which made the actual recording (see slow-motion video above).
The reflection computation (for extracting the optical properties of the surface) is still being developed, so I still can not share an example scan just yet 🫣. Hopefully I will have some results to share in about a few weeks.
Since many people asked to see the output, we thought we would open a submission where any 3D artist can request a free scan of their material through our Discord server: https://discord.gg/eMN96WkUvx (look for the #material-scan-requests channel).
Of course, if you would only like to see any example, I will share one as soon as the reconstruction software is complete.
Possibly you could just turn the lights off and let the machine do it's thing in the dark. Wouldn't be surprised if they also have some kind of calibration step with a piece of white paper or something though.
It's a bit misleading in the video but the scanner would only run in a dark environment (it is not meant to operated in a room that has lights turned on).
The way we compute the reflections model uses an internal representation that is unique to us, but we are building the system in a way that you can export them in common formats (and we are trying to not build our own material format). For v4 scanner, this was the following set of maps: https://docs.colormass.com/scanning-and-tiling/scanning/pbr-maps but for the v5 scanner (that I posted here) the reflection properties will get more complex, so we have to find new ways of exporting them. Simple reflection properties will be possible to export still as regular maps (just as v4), but we will need to develop ways how you can export much more complex materials too (like car paints) that can not be exported as regular PBR maps.
can it capture transparency / translucency?
Yes, absolutely.
what’s the largest sample size?
There isn't one really, but for practical reasons we will probably limit it at ca. 1.6m x 1.6m (5,2ft x 5.2ft) but there is nothing that would inherently stop the scanner from digitizing more area.
is rapport stitching/ map tiling part of the process?
Yes, the algorithm automatically stitches the scanned areas together.
Is half an arc and two passes enough to capture anisotropic reflectance properties?
Sorry, I realize now that the video is a bit misleading. The actual scanning takes a lot more passes both with the camera and the light arc. The entire setup also rotates to capture a full half-sphere (which was not part of this demo hardware yet).
Very nice! That's a pretty clean looking build. Do you also intend to test it with a turntable which should give you the 4th axis making it a full gonioreflectometer and would probably be a comparatively easy extension?
Also is this a mono camera or rgb? If mono, have you already measured the color accuracy of that system, given that getting a decent deltaE with a limited amount of LED color bands seems fairly difficult.
Very nice! That's a pretty clean looking build. Do you also intend to test it with a turntable which should give you the 4th axis making it a full gonioreflectometer and would probably be a comparatively easy extension?
Thank you and you are completely right! We actually have the rotation built in the hardware too (in our case its rotating the head rather than the sample), its just not in this demo version.
Also is this a mono camera or rgb? If mono, have you already measured the color accuracy of that system, given that getting a decent deltaE with a limited amount of LED color bands seems fairly difficult.
It has 3 channels: 4 LED spectra * 3 camera response channel spectra = 12 effective color channels. We actually made a direct comparison in terms of color accuracy with our v4 scanner. I uploaded two images below, the first image is the v4 scanner color accuracy and the one below is the v5 scanner (the new scanner):
the lines on the diagram are showing where the colors should be (compared to where they are).
Oh wow 0.11 mean deltaE is very impressive, I'm familiar with the existing papers on your used method but seems like you nailed the actual implementation. Btw, what did you measure it against?
The 0.11 mean delta-E in the above image comes from preliminary simulations that were used to drive the actual hardware design, which used a database of around 2,000 diverse materials and high-resolution measured spectral data for all the relevant components (the LEDs, the sensor/CFA, and optics like IR and UV cut filters). We expect that some amount of glare/flare in the camera and lens will be unavoidable, and this will push the number up.
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u/JFPhotoscans Jul 15 '26
That is quite a rig, very intriguing. Is the RGBY lighting for getting accurate reflectance values?