Using Marso

A step by step guide on the entire Marso workflow.

What is Marso?

Marso is our PBR material capture software, designed to create 3D assets that can be put into wider 3D worlds. It specialises in capturing hard-surface items, props, furniture and shoes.

Overview

1) Calibration

2) Capture

3) Develop

4) 3D Solve

5) Process

6) Using your asset

Step by step

Calibration - Marso

When you first receive your build, you will need to calibrate your capture system. At this stage, we have seen incredible results with a simple camera and ring flash, a camera and small point light and a robotic capture system, like the Rigsters Arago.

Exposure Calibration - Capturing an image of a grey card.

Light System Calibration - Measuring from camera sensor to flash.

Capture - User

Once you have calibrated your system, you can start capturing. When capturing it is important to follow these hints to increase consistency across results:

Setup Your Scene

• Room Lighting - Ensure your environment is dark when the camera's light or flash is turned off.

• Markers - Use markers to help alignment and to set scale of your scene.

• Reflections - Avoid shooting next to white walls or mirrors to avoid bounce light.

Capturing Your Asset

• Trigger - Only trigger one light source at a time if your using multiple lights.

• Exposure - Use manual settings to maintain a constant exposure per Marso's requirements.

• RAW - Ensure your camera is set to shoot a raw file format.

• Coverage - Be sure to capture the object from as many views as possible, covering all angles.

Following these capture steps will improve consistency of results considerably.

Develop - Marso

Next up is the Develop process, you will see this word across our UI and in tutorials. This step is taking your RAW images captured in the previous step and preparing them to be imported into Reality Capture or Agisoft Metashape.

It is very important you use the images generated by Marso in the develop step to complete photogrammetry.

3D Solve - Reality Capture/Metashape

Once you have your images from the Develop step previously, these can be imported directly into Reality Capture or Metashape to complete your photogrammetry. We want to obtain an alembic and ST map.

Our page dedicated to photogrammetry gives a checklist to follow, you will not get a usable result from Marso if you do not follow this checklist.

Process - Marso

Like the Develop step, you will see the Process step throughout our UI and tutorials. This step takes your alembic and ST map acquired in the previous step, uses our ML model to give you your outputs. Full information on how to configure this step correctly can be found here.

Using your asset

To export your asset, you can follow these steps. You can then take your textures into Blender or Unreal Engine 5+.