From the course: Substance Designer: Material Techniques

Introduction to scanning materials with your smartphone - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer: Material Techniques

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Introduction to scanning materials with your smartphone

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- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll go over how to take any real life materials and turn them into a material in Substance Designer. We'll first cover an example of a scan box set up that allows you to take great pictures of your material, and then process it into Lightroom and Photoshop for use in Substance Designer. So first let's take a look at the set up, and show you what I've used for building a scan box. The first item that I need is a cardboard box. So if we put the box to the side, like so, you'll see that I used a box that is about a foot high. So you can go up to two foot, as long as you have enough space to put a light inside the box. The second thing that you need is a lot of tape. So the tape will be used to basically tape the phone, the phone box, and all the areas where you need to position the printout on the box. The third item is the print out. So as you can see right now, we have a printout that basically will be the guide for actually doing the 45 angle. So you need to do a printout from the URL on the screen, print it out, and then cut the middle where you have the big square where the material is going to go. Then what you need to do is add tracing paper. So in between the print out and the top of the box, you need to put tracing paper, like this. So it could be any tracing paper, and you should put at least two layers of the tracing paper in between the printout and the top of the box. The next thing that you're going to need is a color checker. So you can use one like this, Or you can basically print one out from the web. This is a professional one, you can buy this at B&H Photo. Otherwise you can just do a printout. The next element that you need is the tube. So the tube will allow you to put the phone on the foam board, here and then you stick it to the box. And this is how you're going to be able to take pictures. So you could use any cardboard tube, like a shipping tube, for example. The next item that you need is an LED light. The LED light will basically allow you to take the pictures in the angles that we have on the sheet of paper, here. So with the LED light, what you can do is use any light that looks like this, one you can buy at your local hardware store, or you can buy a professional one for cheap prices. So this can be used for the light under the box, and the also the light that we're going to use at the 45 degree angles when we take the pictures. So for example, if we bring back the box, this is the light that goes under the box, like so. And the last item that you need is the phone. So what I'm using here is an iPhone XR, but you can use anything that has a good camera, and has the latest technologies in terms of how it takes pictures. For the application itself, you can use anything that takes pictures, but what I'm using is Lightroom because it has a lot of settings that you can set in here, and we're going to visit all these settings in the next video.

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