normalscanner

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You will allways finding me trying out or learning something new. As a part of my shortfilm ‚routine‘ I developed a scanner, which can create pixelacurate normals from foliage or any other surface. By researching on the internet about texturescanning and photoscans, I discovered a technic to create normal textures using four lightsources and combining the images.

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The principle is very easy. Just take four images from the same position with the surface lit from left, right, top and bottom. Than you can put those images together in photoshop or substance designer like below: (as a short note, this was way before substance created their own normal-node)

I tested it at first as a small and simple version with just one lightsource that I moved after every picture. The result was stunning and I went crazy. So I built a big scanner with a scanarea of one squaremeter and a total size of 1.3 meters.

The scanner can be powered by a car battery and will fit in a car, which was essential for me to go into the woods. The first tests were at night before I wraped the scanner in black. In case you are curious about the two extra tubes ontop of the scanner, they are for a difuse light to capture the basecolor.

I also automated the scanprocess with an arduino uno that can control all six led tubes, focus and shutter release.

For easy texture generation, a few nodes have been added to get aproximated roughness textures and padding.

It turned out that the scanarea was to small to make big scaled tileable textures but for foliage it worked great.

In conclusion the project was a big success. It is incredible how easy you get that accurate normal maps.