Monday, May 22nd, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Dabarti Capture extracts surface data from photos


Polish CGI Studio Dabarti – known for its GPU rendering and benchmarking work with V-Ray – has just released Dabarti Capture, its in-house tool for extracting surface normal data from photographs.

Capture detailed surface data from real-world objects using a small set of source images
Dabarti Capture can generate surface normal, albedo and depth/displacement maps from photographs of real-world objects, making it possible to create some pretty stunning photorealistic renders.

It requires a minimum of three source photographs, each captured from the same camera position, but under different directional lighting, and each including a “shiny spherical object” like a standard chrome ball.

Once the user has generated a mask for the light probe manually for each of the source images, Dabarti Capture can use the lighting data to generate texture maps from the same camera viewpoint.

Judging by the video above, it looks a quick, good-quality alternative to conventional 3D scanning or photogrammetry techniques for capturing detailed surface data from relatively small objects.

Pricing and availability
Dabarti Capture is available now for Windows only. The Lite version is free and licensed for commercial use, but limited to 1,024px output; the Pro version, which offers unlimited resolution, costs $39.

Read more about Dabarti Capture on Dabarti’s website
(Includes download link for the free Lite edition: requires registration for Dabarti’s email newsletter)