How Surface Scanning helps
Texture Artists & Digital Productions

Textures are common tools used in CGI (Computer Generated Graphics) to put color on 3d objects. Without textures, 3d models look like made of clay.

Nowadays there are multiple ways to create a texture - also see Methods of Acquiring Texture. Among these methods are:

• Drawing or Painting Texture

• Taking Photograph of a Texture

• Procedural Texture Creation

• Texture Scanning

• Downloading or Purchasing Texture

Time the texture artist needs to create a texture for specific 3d model varies based on what the model is and what requirements for textures are. Different methods are differently efficient to get the job done.

Particularly for Home industry where Upholstery, Décor and minimalistic surfaces are used, the most efficient way is texture scanning. Recreation of many surfaces by parametric means or painting can take hours and still not be completely faithful to its original.

Taking a photograph can be a good balance between speed and cost efficiency - however comes at the cost of more complex gradient removal, color equalization and maps guessing.

All in all, getting seamlessly tiled PBR maps means spending tens of minutes on material authoring and finishing the surface compared to possible hour or hours spent while using other techniques.

For creation of configurators, a unified and swappable approach to texture creation need to be setup. While all methods mentioned above can reach the same point with less or more effort - though with some this being almost impossible that only talented artist could do - when building for scale, there is something to be said about pipeline.

The more automated and calibrated pipeline, the higher the chances are of getting to scale. For these cases, texture scanning can help in a big way.