Chaos Scans is a library of highly realistic, physically accurate scanned materials that can be used in your 3D scenes with renderers like V-Ray and Corona. The main advantage is that it simplifies the material creation process, allowing you to achieve photorealistic results without having to build complex material networks from scratch.
1. Accessing the Materials
Chaos Cosmos: The most modern workflow involves accessing Chaos Scans materials through the Chaos Cosmos library. This allows you to simply drag and drop the scanned material directly into your scene. This is a significant workflow improvement.
V-Ray/Corona Material Editor: You can also load a scanned material file (which typically has a .vrscan extension) directly into your scene. You would use a dedicated "Scanned Material" node within your renderer's material editor to load the file.
Downloading: You will need to download the materials you want to use from the Chaos Scans library. There are thousands of materials available, including car paints, leather, fabrics, wood, plastic, and more.
2. Applying and Customizing the Materials
Once you've loaded a Chaos Scans material into your scene, you can apply it to your 3D objects. While the materials are designed to be "out-of-the-box" realistic, you still have some control to customize their look:
Tiling and Coordinates: You can adjust the UV tiling, rotation, and offset to ensure the material scales correctly on your object.
Triplanar Mapping: If your object has poor or no UV mapping, you can use triplanar mapping, a feature that applies the texture from three directions, eliminating the need for a proper UV layout.
Color Customization: You can tint the color of the material using a "Filter Color" or change the base color without affecting the reflections with a "Paint Color" setting.
Bump and Displacement: Chaos Scans often have built-in bump and displacement information. You can typically control the strength of these effects to fine-tune the surface detail.
Two-Sided Functionality: For thin objects like fabrics or paper, you can enable a "two-sided" function so the material renders on both the front and back of the geometry.
3. Rendering
Chaos Scans materials are designed to work seamlessly with Chaos Group's rendering engines, V-Ray and Corona. They are compatible with both CPU and GPU rendering, providing flexibility and good performance.
Key advantages of using Chaos Scans:
Photorealism: The materials are based on thousands of real-world scans, capturing a level of detail and light response that is extremely difficult to recreate manually.
Efficiency: The "drag-and-drop" workflow and pre-configured settings save a significant amount of time and effort compared to creating materials from scratch.
Physical Accuracy: The technology captures bidirectional texture functions (BTF), which means it accurately represents how light interacts with the material from different viewing angles, providing a highly realistic result.
