Customers send in their material samples, and Chaos’s lab techs scan, process, and deliver a. The VRscans system is a full-service, physical material scanning service. The system works well with complex weaves such as cloth, but does not do sub surface scatter nor does it scan highly reflective materials such as sunglasses or mirrored chrome surfaces.

What is returned is a packaged solution to rendering the material and not a set of normal texture maps and V-Ray settings. The files themselves are not interchangable with other renderers and are not easily editable. The system works simply with users sending samples off and getting back a comprehensive digital version which can be as large as 320mb.

Highly accurate and simple to obtain material textures will be hugely popular with garment and show designers, but still VFX houses may find this the ‘ultimate reference’ for matching say live action costumes to digital doubles. This should be seen as further validation of the importance of the industrial design market. The first thing that should be noted is that the company is not targeting this at the VFX community, although there has been a lot of interest from the effects community around the announcement. Not only is this a bureau service, but it is possible for large companies to explore having their own VRscanners in house. After nearly five years of research and planning, the company now offers real world material scanning and textures. With the huge success of V-Ray and the growth of Chaos Group along with that, it was still a surprise to many to learn of VRscans. Last week the Chaos Group moved from being a software provider to also being a hardware or service company.

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