When we work outside, the weather can be our greatest supporter but also an enemy. The cloudy day is perfect. In scanned rooms, you can cover windows and use several sources of artificial lighting. I also like to work with flash lamps with diffusers – then the scanning process is very efficient and the shadows are leveled.

Of course, I always work with RAW image format – photo processing is another easy way to get rid of light-shadows in Lightroom. Removing shadows is sometimes a very time-consuming process, often requiring manual tweak. The better the input material is the easier it is to achieve a good end result. As said, sometimes it is not worth improving something and if we have the opportunity to repeat the scanning process to save time, we do it.

Cleaning Scanned Assets

Michal: For scans, I use Capturing Reality. If RAW scan requires it I clean it and then retopo (I prefer manual but sometimes automatic also works), UV and bake texture in Marmoset. Then come texture tweaks (I also usually generate a normal map from albedo and mix it with the normal map from the scan to increase the amount of small detail), the final fixes and model is in the engine.

At the beginning of the process, besides HP, I prepare its decimated version with one small texture – it is a whitebox that has the scale and orientation of the final model. With this decimate model we can start to quickly prototype the level and draw conclusions whether the scan is useful or not.

Modular pieces: