Marso Processing Options
This page will assist you in selecting processing options for Marso.
Capture Methods
Multi-Viewpoint = Freehand, Turntable, Lightstage, Robot Controlled.
Generation
Gen 1.0 = Works well for most scans, does require a high coverage count and well aligned camera poses.
Gen 2.0 = Improves results for freehand scans that have low image overlap, increased material clarity. Only available for the Narrow Material Gamut.
Material Gamut
Wide = A wider gamut of materials, including reflective and colour metals. Good quality but less accurate then the narrow material gamut.
Narrow = Fine-Tuned on a narrow gamut of materials, not including metals. Great for leathers, woods and plastics e.g Shoes & Furniture.
Understanding Materials Gamuts
What is PBR?
PBR-material-properties can describe a wide range of physical materials, ranging from the simple leathers, woods, and all the way through to complex physical materials such as metal chromes, copper, and shiny coloured nylons.
Two Principal Shaders
PBR generally describes two main workflows: a Specular-Workflow or a Metallic-Workflow. They both aim to do roughly the same thing, but are built for slightly different use cases.
The Specular Workflow can describe far more materials at the cost of having to store more data, and being slightly less intuitive for artists. It has a coloured specular texture, which is able to describe both matte objects, glossy surfaces, and transition all the way up to metal objects within a 0-1 range.
The Metallic Workflow is a simplification of the specular-workflow, aimed at being more data efficient and artist-friendly. The metallic-workflow, uses a greyscale texture map which is often binary, to describe if the surface is a metal or a non metal. In contrast to the specular workflow which uses a coloured texture map to describe the full scope of both metal and non-metals, with a transition occurring somewhere along this range.
For this reason, a specular-workflow covers more of the potential material property space than the metallic-workflow, whilst being able to be converted into mapped into a metal shader.
Marso by default, authors material textures into both workflows simultaneously making it easy to plug into a variety of different 3D applications.
How Marso handles complex and easy material types
Marso has been designed to capture as many material types (real world) as possible, and M-XR’s researchers are continuing to push the bounds of what Marso can acquire!
Think of all these possible materials as a spectrum of space, similar to a colour space, and M-XR’s ambitions with Marso is to capture as wide of a gamut of this space as possible.
Marso is capable of capturing quite a wide-gamut of this material space, to offer more photorealistic objects with unique properties. However, this makes the challenge of identifying materials much harder. This can sometimes lead to subtle inconsistencies in some of the material properties, notably roughness.
To mitigate this, and give our users more control, Marso offers the option to select between two different material Gamuts : Wide and Narrow, depending on your scan and use case.
Narrow vs Wide Gamuts
Whichever gamut you select, you can still use these in a metallic or specular workflow!
Capable of measuring all the materials very confidently within a slightly narrower gamut of this potential material space such as leathers, plastics, fabrics, woods, ceramics. What it cannot do is capture material outside of this range as they start to become metals.
Tips & Tricks for suggested workflows
If you are unsure which Gamut to use, then it is best to just use both. Exporting for both wide and narrow doesn’t create a huge overhead for Marso, maybe an extra __ minutes or __% of additional processing time.
Often, when predicting on a Wide Gamut, our users will find that swapping the roughness and normals for the ones from the narrow gamut gives the best results.
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