This year (2025) I decided to give some more information about my rendering, and I’ll create these “Project Info Cards” for every project I make.
Each one has “Raw” and “Rendered” images of the project, and some information about the materials and render details in them. I’m still adding and editing them as I go.
Check out all of them from my Behance profile!
Substance Sampler has a new beta feature which you can use to create realistic models by “scanning” them! All you need is your phone or camera, and take at least 20-30 photos from different angles of your object.
As said, all you need is a camera and good lightning. Cloudy daytime has been the best time to scan when I’ve been doing it outdoors. In this example I scanned some chicken wings indoors, and even when the lightning wasn’t perfect I got quite good results.
You can tweak some settings in Sampler, so far I’ve been using pretty much the default settings on my scans and had good results. When you’ve enough images from differents angles (at least 20-30 in my experience), you should be good to go!
Only problem so far has been all the extra stuff Sampler took along in the process, and I had to clean up my mesh a bit later on. When scanning indoors you should take away any surrounding objects, this can be harder to do when scanning nature outdoors.
I finalized my scan by rendering it in Stager. I didn’t need to do any texturing, just bit of depth-of-field and lightning edit. See below the results of this and few other scans I’ve made too. Thanks for reading!
I wanted to try out a way to create complex looking scene with Stager in a way which isn’t taking too much resources from your PC and making your scene really heavy and hard to work with.
So instead of using complex models and textures including displacement, I used base image and created opacity out of it and applied those two into a plane.
I set up my scene by placing four planes vertically and using the vines texture on them, and two on the ground using the waterlily texture. I finalized the scene with a plane which is using metallic surface mimicking still water surface, and some depth of field focus on the sphere.
As you can see, the result is quite good even when I just used simple planes with image and a opacity map on them, this could be quite useful trick if you need to make a scene/mockup in a quick timeline, or if your PC’s struggling when using textures with displacement and high-poly models.
