Material Capture at Scale with HP Z Captis and Substance 3D Sampler
Accurately capturing and digitizing real-world materials is a significant challenge in which the accuracy of every surface detail matters. The demand for precise digital material capture at scale has never been greater, whether for product visualization, virtual prototyping, or immersive experiences.
To help companies digitize real-world materials at scale, Adobe worked with HP to create the HP Z Captis, a solution that combines best-in-class hardware scanning with industry-leading 3D material creation software to provide users with an easy-to-use, push-button approach to material capture.
The need for companies to efficiently capture digital materials stems from the growing reliance on digital twins across industries. Digital twins streamline design processes by eliminating the need for physical prototypes, significantly reducing waste and lowering carbon footprints. Additionally, they enable companies to create prototypes faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
Once a digital twin is approved during the design phase, it can also be repurposed for marketing — whether populating e-commerce platforms, creating lifestyle visuals, or building campaigns. This efficiency extends to post-launch updates, such as introducing new colorways or product variations without the need for costly reshoots or manual adjustments.
Digital twins also make it easier for geographically remote employees to work together. Instead of waiting for a physical sample to be shipped to them, designers can start work immediately using a digital representation of the material.
HP and Adobe designed HP Z Captis to enable high-fidelity scans, optimize material libraries, and integrate effortlessly into a broader 3D ecosystem. It provides a streamlined connection with Substance 3D Sampler, where creatives, designers, and manufacturers can now generate high quality digital twins of materials, at scale.
Working with the HP Z Captis
Adopting this solution is incredibly straightforward. To begin, you place a sample of the material into Captis. In Substance 3D Sampler, you can use the Preview mode to run calibrations, position the sample, adjust focus, exposure and more with easy and automated tools. Captis autofocuses on the material, allowing users to set a white point and initiate the scan. Then you hit the button and the capture starts: a 4K scan takes about 3 minutes, while an 8K scan takes approximately 12 minutes.
Once the scan is complete, Substance 3D Sampler makes it easy to clean up wrinkles or imperfections and ensure the material is tileable. This step typically takes an additional 10 minutes. We are also exploring automated workflows that could handle repetitive tasks and connect multiple scanners, enabling companies to process large quantities of materials daily.
From there, you can choose to export your digital twin perfectly matching your physical sample, or to stay in Sampler and augment your material by tapping into Substance 3D Sampler’s creative tools to enhance your scan or even explore new creative possibilities — adjust colors, import graphics, apply emboss effects, overlay patterns, or even generate new ones using Firefly. You can then expose specific parameters and export the material as a fully parametric SBSAR file, ready to be used across a wide range of applications. This flexibility makes it easy to integrate high-quality, customizable materials into any 3D workflow.
Connecting Captis to Substance 3D Sampler
Connecting Captis to Substance 3D Sampler is intuitive and user-friendly. Once Captis is connected to your computer, the scanned material automatically appears in Sampler. From there, you can fine-tune the material, ensuring that it’s optimized for your specific needs. This streamlined integration minimizes your manual effort and makes the entire process accessible, even if you’re new to material digitization.
You can use the HP Z Captis and Substance 3D Sampler to capture a vast range of materials, from traditional ones, like cloth, leather, wood, and concrete, to more complex options, such as lace. We’ve even pushed its capabilities to capture unconventional materials like pavement, grass, paint strokes, and even fried rice. The versatility of this workflow makes it an excellent solution for digitizing materials across industries, including fashion, architecture, industrial design, VFX and games.
“One of the main challenges with creating digital twins has been ensuring the accuracy of the physical material’s representation,” said Adobe’s head of 3D Technical artists Michael Tanzillo. “The Captis and Sampler workflow delivers some of the most accurate digital reproductions I’ve seen. The advanced scanning process handles complex materials, such as transparent or complex fabrics, as well as any number of organic materials, with remarkable precision.”
Studio Mode vs. Explorer Mode
Being able to scan numerous materials from within the studio is great, but what if some surfaces are difficult to transport or are only available in some unique locations? The intent with the HP Z Captis has always been to cover multiple use-cases: sample to device and device to sample.
You use Studio Mode when you’re working with a sample that fits easily in the device. Explorer Mode is for everything else. If you can’t move the sample or make it fit easily into the device, Explorer Mode allows you to take the Captis out of the studio and capture materials where they are.
Of course, the results in Explorer Mode may be somewhat different than those from working in the studio. Explorer Mode is more flexible but may require longer preparation. If you raise the Captis to accommodate the material you’re capturing, you gain access to a larger capture area, but the lighting is not as optimal, and the quality may decrease.
“I love that a single device can do both — you don’t have to use a different one for the five percent of corner cases of your library,” said Adobe senior research engineer Jerome Derel. “And the fact that it’s not the size of half a room; you can stay at the office and move it around or take it outside and go anywhere.”
Read more about Adobe Research and Captis.
Integration with the 3D Ecosystem
The Captis workflow integrates seamlessly with the broader 3D ecosystem by generating SBSAR files that are compatible with nearly all 3D applications. These files work natively within the Substance 3D Suite but can also be exported for use in tools like Clo, V-Stitcher, VRED, Maya, Cinema 4D, Unreal Engine, and more. Whether your focus is ray-traced rendering, real-time experiences, immersive technologies, or online configurators, this workflow ensures you have a single source of truth for your materials.
This compatibility means you can use the same material files for everything from concept design to production, marketing, and even 3D printing. It’s a solution designed to unify workflows and provide versatility across industries.
How HP Z Captis Works: Image Capture and Processing
The technology that underpins the Captis is impressive. Under the hood in Captis, a capture sequence of thousands of images is being built. For every light and polarization state, a custom processing chain is executed, merging 10 bits depth RAW images into 32 floating point HDRs, reducing noise, lens shading and other camera artifacts. The capture result is a photometry dataset of 72 images: (8 direct light panels + optional backlight) x 8 polarization states.
The material estimation is the next step in Captis, done in patches for memory footprint, with a final step on the whole image at the end. It's first splitting direct lighting into diffuse and specular signals using polarization, diffuse being used for base color, normal and height estimation. Captis uses backlight to estimate opacity when available. For now, Captis discards specular signals, though these will be used later for additional channels.
What’s next?
“We've only scratched the surface of the Explorer Mode,” Derel said. Among the questions the team is exploring: “How high can we go until everything falls apart? How many captures can we do and store using battery power, then process back at the office? Can we sacrifice on time or quality to save battery and capture more samples in remote settings?”
Another area of experimentation is optimization of the capture sequence depending on the sample, Derel said. “We don't always need eight exposures for HDR bracketing — maybe four lights or fewer polarization states are enough for simple situations. It could speed up drastically the capture and when you're capturing hundreds of materials, every minute counts.”
Watch our tutorial covering the workflow of capturing and creating high quality digital materials using the HP Z Captis with Substance 3D Sampler: