VRscans – An Impressive Tool by Chaos Group
VRscans – V-Ray’s Physically Accurate Material Scanning Service
Being a professional 3D Artist, I tend to get excited when it comes to new tools to help with workflow. When I heard about VRscans from Chaos Group, I was very interested. I have heard about Quixel’s Megascans and I thought this would be V-Ray’s equivalent. It turns out it’s a little different. I think about it this way; Quixel Megascans is for nature and exterior environments, VRscans is for interiors and man made materials. Both use scanned data but Chaos Group took it to the next level.
They have built a scanning machine that takes data from materials and makes them into physically accurate V-Ray Materials to use in 3ds Max or similar 3D applications. Basically, you send in a material swatch to Chaos Group, they scan it with their proprietary machine, and send you a V-Ray Scanned Material to use in your 3D scene. With some of the work we do for client’s having a 100% accurate material is essential, so this would alleviate the need to spend hours working on making the material perfect.
Chaos Group also has a growing library of scanned materials to download when you purchase a VRscans license. I believe they have over 500 materials as of today. They range from various woods, to metals, and even Carbon Fiber, which is pretty complicated to say the least.
I was able to test out VRscans this weekend and the results were pretty amazing. Setting up the material is as easy and applying the VRayScannedMtl to your object and selecting the VRscans file. I downloaded a few from the trial license and they look fantastic. The example I’m showing here is the black leather VRscans. I built a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 to use for our office and residential interior scenes for clients. Since I own this actual tablet, I thought it would be a good addition to our model collection. The backing of the tablet is leather so I thought it would be a good, quick test for VRscans. Here is the before shot:
And here is the after shot:
You can tell right away that the VRscans is drastically better. Granted, the leather material I made originally wasn’t the greatest. I spent more time on the front and sides of the tablet instead of the back because when we place these electronics into our scenes, we’ve never shown a device’s back. Now, could I have made a material like this on my own using proper maps and IOR information? Probably. How long would it take me? A lot longer than loading up a VRscans material that’s for sure. Getting the leather to look like that was probably a 30 second task.
The scanning device Chaos Group uses takes all the information you would need to make an accurate material and puts it together for you. I’m going to try some more tests sometime soon, but so far, I am pretty impressed. I’m looking forward to seeing the materials that pop up in the VRscans library in the next few months!
