Human Alloy unveils The Master Collection: over 4,000 3D humans

[Sponsored] Human Alloy founder Tristan Bethe reveals how decades of experience in scanning digital humans have culminated in The Master Collection: a set of 4,750 optimized 3D people for use in professional visualization, available this Black Friday via 100 exclusive lifetime licenses.

For CG Channel readers who remember Human Alloy from years ago, the news that we are releasing The Master Collection may feel like a relaunch, but the story goes all the way back to 2008, when I was working in architectural visualization, creating illustrations and animations.

During a project for the renovation of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands, someone asked why we were still using cutout 2D people in our renders. The answer was simple: there weren’t many good 3D human assets available at the time.

But that question sent me down a rabbit hole. I bought a very expensive 3D scanner, and spent several years scanning people. Even combined with a laser scanner for facial detail, performance wasn’t amazing: the workflow was slow, error-prone, and definitely not scalable.

What was scalable, however, was photogrammetry. I started experimenting with multi-camera rigs and ended up taking on my first major scanning project: building an eight-camera setup to digitize shoes for Nike’s shoe archive in Portland. That job kicked off everything that came after.

Human Alloy founder Tristan Bethe inside its human photogrammetry scanner.

The birth of Human Alloy

Around that time, I met my future Human Alloy co-founder, Rudo Bisschop. He also owned an expensive but underwhelming scanner, and we both had the same itch: to make high-quality digital humans at scale.

I invested my Nike money in the project, and in 2015, we built our first full-size human photogrammetry scanner: a 130-DSLR setup. We spent our weekends scanning hundreds of people, but with just two artists processing everything, the bottleneck was cleaning up the raw scan data. Cleanup is where ‘photogrammetry fun’ turns into ‘production reality’.

Meanwhile, interest from other industries grew. The fashion world discovered that we could scan products extremely accurately, so we built a dedicated shoe/object scanner using the same camera systems. That later led to a massive job for Adidas, digitizing 3,000 shoes using a custom spherical scanner with 130 cameras.

We ended up building entire pipelines for scanning products at scale — something that wasn’t common back then. That work eventually put us on the radar of Snapchat developer Snap Inc.

The Snap years

Snap was building a business offering of their tech. As part of that, they were looking for a team who understood scanning pipelines and could scale high-quality 3D content creation. That’s exactly what we were doing.

Snap acquired our company in 2022, and we built a new, extremely advanced scanning rig: 180 system cameras, polarized lighting, lasers — the whole works. It was built to scan products at absurd levels of precision for AR.

Ironically, that scanner never made a single scan. After about a year, the project was cancelled, and we were all let go. It happens.

Nevertheless, it was an amazing time, but professionally it left one big question: what’s next?

The rebirth of Human Alloy

At this point, two things made me return to Human Alloy. First, unfinished business. We had around 6,000 unprocessed human scans sitting on hard drives — hundreds of scan sessions, with models, makeup artists, and stylists. It felt wrong to let years of work disappear.

Second, I realized I actually enjoy finishing things more than I expected. Last year I rebuilt HumanAlloy.com from scratch and remastered the older models, just to get them online again. Seeing them neatly organized on a clean, modern site gave me a ridiculous amount of joy. That’s when the idea clicked: finish the full collection.

After filtering, categorizing, and removing duplicates or problematic captures, I was left with around 4,200 new digital humans. I teamed up with Ikarus 3D (we’d worked together on previous mass-scanning projects), and their team cleaned the entire set in about four months.

That became the backbone of The Master Collection.

The Master Collection contains over 4,000 3D people – enough to create huge simulations.

So what is The Master Collection?

The Master Collection is the entire Human Alloy library — everything we ever scanned, cleaned, and validated — released as a complete, curated bundle.

In numbers:

Over 4,750 3D people
4,200 newly processed
Around 550 older models, remastered

The other key specs:

OBJ, FBX, MAX, SKP formats
Lightweight baseline assets (~40,000 triangles, 2K diffuse texture), but highly upscalable
Designed to work in any DCC application, game engine, or offline renderer

If you bought the assets individually at the usual $12/model, that would come to over $57,000.

But for the launch window, the price of The Master Collection will be €995 for freelancers and €1,995 for studios, with only 100 licenses available for each.

It’s a once-in-a-career release. I’m not planning to do this again.

Human Alloy creates clean, optimized assets, tailored to real-world production pipelines.

How is The Master Collection different from standard stock assets?

The assets in The Master Collection differ from the generic digital humans available today in three main ways:

1. They’re exclusive.
These models are not part of any free or subscription-based libraries. That alone helps your work stand out.

2. They’re consistent.
Everything was scanned with similar lighting, similar rigs, similar distances, and similar setup philosophies. Anyone who has built large 3D crowds knows how rare that consistency is.

3. They’re usable.
These aren’t heavy VFX characters with 22 texture sets and a cinema-quality groom. They’re optimized, clean, lightweight humans that you can scatter, pose, render, and upscale.

Ready for new AI-enhanced production workflows

The models in The Master Collection also play nicely with new AI-based workflows. AI has been a game-changer for how digital humans can be used in production, in a very practical way.

Our models are around 40k triangles with 2K textures. That keeps them fast and easy to handle. But with AI upscaling, you can render them at that lightweight baseline, then enhance them in post to reach a level of detail that used to require heavy, multi-layered assets.

It’s basically a new, smarter LOD system:

Low overhead in the viewport
High realism in final output
No need to load huge textured meshes
Consistent look across shots

Instead of thinking, “AI replaces assets”, I think, “AI upgrades assets you already control”.

Register below for access to the purchase link for The Master Collection as soon as it launches.

Pre-register for access ahead of the launch on Black Friday

At this point, I’d like to thank everyone who supported Human Alloy over the years. This release means a lot. If The Master Collection is well received, I have around a thousand A-posed scans waiting. With modern rigging and deformation techniques, they could become poseable – or even animated – characters. There’s a lot of potential there.

But for now, I want to finally finish the project I started in 2008 and get these 4,750 models into the world.

The Master Collection launches on Black Friday 2025, and only 100 licenses will be available. If you want early access, you can sign up using the link below.

About the author: Tristan Bethe is a 3D artist, scanning specialist, and founder of Human Alloy, where he has created over 6,000 high-res scans of real people. His upcoming release, The Master Collection, represents the complete archive of Human Alloy’s work: over 4,700 digital humans, curated for artists worldwide.