Today we will take you through our scan production pipeline, all the way from capture to the post-processing of scans with Substance Designer. Follow us step-by-step through the challenges we faced and the solutions we built to overcome them.

As you can imagine, we need powerful computers to create and process all these PBR materials. Substance Designer is our main tool, and we use it with full NVIDIA GPU support.

We’ll show you our custom photogrammetry pipeline in Substance Designer 2017: how we processed 100 scanned materials in less than two weeks for a Substance Source drop, as well as how we increased our production speed with the new NVIDIA Quadro P6000 24Gb.

Photogrammetry and Maps

We travel and capture grounds, walls and all sort of interesting surfaces with ultra HD cameras. The process is fairly simple. You need to find a place with a flat surface without too much variations in terms of object, colors and height.

At first, I remove elements that are too visible or that will move during the acquisition.

Then you put a measuring tape and a color checker in order to get a physical size and a good white balance.

Put your camera on a pole or a tripod, depend of the time you need and if the weather is with you. I mean sometimes, moving clouds will cast shadows on you surface and if there is wind, some leaves could move and destroy your scan.

Then check the overlap you need between each of your picture depending of your focal lens. That will give you the steps you need to do to cover all the surface.

At the middle of your acquisition quickly check your picture (white balance/ focus/ motion blur) to be sure you are good to continue.

Scan acquisition setup for Pine forest floor material