The colormass AI material technology can convert standard flatbed scans or top-down images into PBR maps. Unlike ordinary tools, this AI has been trained with more than 10.000 svBRDF scans captured by the colormass scanner.
We have developed an advanced AI system that turns photos of textile samples into full 3D materials, ready for realistic 3D renders, web configurators, and more. This is based on years of collecting high-quality scanning data. Our AI models are trained to predict full Physically Based Rendering (PBR) maps from just one photo of a textile.
Our system builds on the same diffusion principles popularized by text-to-image models, but here the conditioning input is a photo rather than a text prompt. This setup is particularly well-suited to generating PBR maps, because diffusion models sample from the full distribution of potential outputs instead of converging on a single, “average” result. By preserving the variability and high-frequency detail found in real-world surfaces, they avoid the blurriness often seen in straightforward regression methods, ultimately delivering more natural-looking renders.
If you’re curious, you can dive deeper into the technical details in our blog post.
Over the past six years, at colormass we have developed multiple versions of the scanner, with the current model being the 4th iteration.
In the US, we have built two of these advanced scanners for customers, who each scan and post process hundreds of surfaces every month.
colormass Material AI is the only AI tool on the market for generating PBR materials, powered by a unique dataset of over 10,000 high-quality svBRDF scans. Read our blog post for more details.
This breakthrough is possible thanks to colormass’ continuous svBRDF material scanning since 2017.
Below are some examples of how our model performs on new data scanned with a regular flatbed scanner. Since these weren’t captured with a colormass scanner, there are no ground truth maps — but they show how well the model can handle real-world images.
Each .zip file includes the original image (ORIGINAL.png) and the generated material maps.
In the last 6 years, colormass has developed multiple versions of scanners, with the current one being the fourth iteration, while continuously refining its technology.
The scanner you see in the background was the Generation v3 (the version right before the current one). This scanner version still had a dome shape.
