colormass releases 177 material scans for free
colormass, a company that digitizes materials for interior, textile and e-commerce brands, has made 177 scans from its own library publicly available. The materials are free for personal and commercial projects, and each scan ships as a set of TIFF files including eight maps.
What sets this apart from the usual free packs is how it was produced. These are not hand-made materials but svBRDF scans captured on hardware developed in-house by colormass. According to the company, the scanner takes thousands of measurements from a sample in order to record the physical properties of the surface.
Character artists benefit the most
The library's makeup skews toward fabrics: synthetic leather, denim, linen, cotton, viscose, jersey, mesh, wool. colormass itself notes that the set is especially useful for character art and clothing lookdev.
Besides textiles, the set includes wood, glass, paint, ceramics and tile, as well as organics — dry oak foliage and houseplant soil. The scans are intended for environments, props and character lookdev.
What the map set includes
Per colormass documentation, the scanner computes diffuse, normal, roughness, specular, metalness, anisotropy strength and rotation, displacement, and an optional transmission map. The anisotropy maps set the direction of the highlight — along the threads of a weave, for instance — while transmission handles translucent fabrics and leaves.
Hence the limitation: the textures work best in renderers with PBR support — there, the company says, the material comes together quickly and without extra preparation.
How the scanning is done
Each sample passes under an industrial camera on a moving table, lit by LEDs with a high color rendering index. The data then goes to the cloud, where the physical properties of the surface are computed and production-ready maps are assembled.
The rig works at industrial scale: the maximum capture area is about 1.8 by 1.8 meters and resolution reaches roughly 800 DPI, so a 40 by 40 centimeter sample turns into textures on the order of 13,000 by 13,000 pixels. The capture itself takes about a minute per 10 by 10 centimeters, while a full svBRDF material computation takes up to 8–12 hours versus 10–20 minutes for simplified scanning methods. colormass refined the technology over more than six years; the current scanner is the fourth generation, and rigs are already running in New York, Portland and Berlin. The company showed how it works in a separate video.
You can send in your own sample for scanning
The set can be downloaded from the colormass library. The same place runs a contribution scheme: through the company's Patreon you can order a scan of your own material sample — provided the result becomes part of the public library. For an artist that is a way to get a scan of a specific fabric or surface; for colormass, a way to expand the database with other people's samples.
Why the scans are being given away
Releasing commercial scans for free looks logical given where the company itself is heading: colormass sells not individual textures but scanning hardware, cloud processing and digitization services. In that configuration a single scan stops being the main product, and a showcase of 177 materials works as a quality demonstration for potential corporate clients.
Other owners of scanning pipelines are following a similar path, periodically opening up part of their libraries to artists. If the trend continues, the barrier to entry for physically accurate materials will keep falling, and competition between libraries will likely shift from the number of files to the fidelity of the measurements — anisotropy, transmission, real surface scale. In that scenario the hardest hit would be sellers of ordinary texture packs assembled from photographs.
Why is colormass giving its captures away for free: a fight over the svBRDF standard, advertising for its scanning service, pressure from free libraries?