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OK, I love a good build story like any other geek out there, but I'm not sure what the purpose of this is? The article says to detect metals? Or capture 'textur

OK, I love a good build story like any other geek out there, but I'm not sure what the purpose of this is? The article says to detect metals? Or capture 'textures' of fine grained surfaces? Any clarifications would be welcome!

DiThi 9y ago
It seems to me that it's ideal for making several channels of textures (color, normal map, metalness, maybe roughness/glossy in the future) as input of a material in a 3D game engine or CGI picture/animation. Kind of a "3D scanner" for the 2D part of 3D scenes (textures).
dmit 9y ago
Normal maps are a technique used in 3D graphics to emulate surface details on a mesh (3D model). Think of a brick house - if you want to render a detailed close-up view of the wall, the naive approach would be to include the seams between individual bricks in the wall mesh itself and render that. But that takes a lot of effort for the modeler and greatly complicates the mesh in terms of how many polygons it consists of. Alternatively, you can use a flat mesh and specify a normal map - an additional 2D image that, when applied on top of the wall texture, encodes which parts of it are protruding/depressed compared to the base level of the mesh. This way you can model a bunch of buildings using simple boxy meshes and then implant details to the walls using a combination of textures and normal maps. The project above automatically creates normal maps of metallic surfaces using a camera extension. This is useful for 3D modelers, since they no longer need to have special normal maps manually created for each surface type in a scene.
- kelvin0 9y ago
  OK, I am familiar with normal maps, now I get what the use case is. Thanks for the clarifications!
microcolonel 9y ago
In 3D rendering, it is useful to have texture maps which define a number of material characteristics. One such characteristic is metalness. Technically, all materials fall into one of two categories, metal and dielectric (the values in between are a convenience to prevent aliasing, since texels can't address individual atoms), each with different rules for shading. For example, dielectrics have specular reflection which is consistent across the visual spectrum; metals can have a coloured specular reflection. Recovering specular, metalness, normal, and roughness data in a controlled lighting environment also allows you to capture accurate albedo (aka diffuse color) textures. Metalness textures are an important part of current "Physically Based Shading" techniques, in both realtime and offline rendering, because they allow materials to react consistently to different lighting environments.

DiThi 9y ago

It seems to me that it's ideal for making several channels of textures (color, normal map, metalness, maybe roughness/glossy in the future) as input of a material in a 3D game engine or CGI picture/animation. Kind of a "3D scanner" for the 2D part of 3D scenes (textures).

dmit 9y ago

Normal maps are a technique used in 3D graphics to emulate surface details on a mesh (3D model). Think of a brick house - if you want to render a detailed close-up view of the wall, the naive approach would be to include the seams between individual bricks in the wall mesh itself and render that. But that takes a lot of effort for the modeler and greatly complicates the mesh in terms of how many polygons it consists of. Alternatively, you can use a flat mesh and specify a normal map - an additional 2D image that, when applied on top of the wall texture, encodes which parts of it are protruding/depressed compared to the base level of the mesh. This way you can model a bunch of buildings using simple boxy meshes and then implant details to the walls using a combination of textures and normal maps. The project above automatically creates normal maps of metallic surfaces using a camera extension. This is useful for 3D modelers, since they no longer need to have special normal maps manually created for each surface type in a scene.

kelvin0 9y ago
OK, I am familiar with normal maps, now I get what the use case is. Thanks for the clarifications!

microcolonel 9y ago

In 3D rendering, it is useful to have texture maps which define a number of material characteristics. One such characteristic is metalness. Technically, all materials fall into one of two categories, metal and dielectric (the values in between are a convenience to prevent aliasing, since texels can't address individual atoms), each with different rules for shading. For example, dielectrics have specular reflection which is consistent across the visual spectrum; metals can have a coloured specular reflection. Recovering specular, metalness, normal, and roughness data in a controlled lighting environment also allows you to capture accurate albedo (aka diffuse color) textures. Metalness textures are an important part of current "Physically Based Shading" techniques, in both realtime and offline rendering, because they allow materials to react consistently to different lighting environments.