Chaos Group, makers of V-Ray, have announced a new scanning technology that can produce an exact digital replica of a physical material with sub-mm precision. VRscans captures each material’s full appearance, including surface texture, reflectivity, dimensionality and its response to light. This data is read by the VRscans plugin, creating a physically accurate material that can be rendered from any angle and in any lighting condition. To find out more about this latest Chaos Group product, visit the VRscans website.
VRscans from Chaos Group
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They look pretty good, but the samples shown don’t really look that much better than taking a photo / scan and doing your own IMHO. They look a tad sharper, but could be achieved by shader tweaking – and all without shipping samples.
I’m not their market though, this is likely for large scale projects, like manufacturers etc.
Long time ago, there was a great plugin for photoshop that could extract a very physically correct displacement map out of at least 3 photos. The only thing you had to do is to find a source of parallel light (sunlight) and a turntable. You put the camera on a tripod, got yourself a lazy susan rig with the material that you could spin in at least 3 positions and also you had to know how to compensate for lens vignetting (like camera raw is able to do now) and you had the perfect displacement map.
… Not perfect, because that method creates shadow artefacts, as is actually for normal maps.