VRscans from Chaos Group Physically Accurate Materials

Chaos Group has announced VRscans, a new service and set of tools for animators and artists that require the ultimate in fidelity for the materials in their scenes. VRscans combines a scanning service with a set of special plugins for their flagship renderer, V-Ray, to achieve unprecedented accuracy in depicting challenging materials.

The service element of VRscans is offered to professionally scan your actual physical swatches giving ultra-photoreal results. So, you ship those to one of the Chaos Group offices and once scanned, they are returned to you. Chaos Group states that fabric, leather, plastic, metal, wood and stone will scan best. A special format file from Chaos Group is electronically delivered to you. This file, a .vrscan file, is a V-Ray specific format that includes all the information relating to texture, surface reflectivity, dimensionality, and light response in a single file. Limited adjustments can be made to color, uv tiling, bump strength, but generally the file is not editable – it is designed to preserve all the attributes of the original scan. Chaos Group will ensure it is perfectly tilable (if applicable) during their file preparation work.

A .vrscan plug-in must be installed in your 3D software to allow you to load this new format as a material and assign it to geometry in your scene. Currently, 3ds Max and Maya are supported. Once you have purchased the plugin ($420/year) you are allowed access to a growing library of other .vrscan files. VRscans can also be purchased on a monthly basis. Visit our purchase page to purchase the VRscans plugin. Render node licenses are required if additional computers will be used.

The cost to scan a material and create a .vrscan file for you is $420 per scan, possibly more depending on the complexity of the material. Documentation about VRscans and frequently asked questions can be found here.