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Around two years ago, we were contacted by Antoine Richard, a researcher from the University of Luxembourg working on a paper relating to ML vision-based navigation of lunar rovers. As there is no GPS on the moon, rovers require other methods of spatial positioning if they are to be automatically maneuvered. Antoine was interested in a machine-vision approach, which required a set of synthetic training data created from somewhat accurate lunar regolith (moon dirt) textures. He contacted us to propose a collaboration partially sponsored by the University and Spaceport Rostock, where we would fly to their lab in Rostock, Germany, to scan the regolith simulant. Once we were able to cover our own travel costs thanks to support from our Patreon supporters, we had free rein for a week to scan as much as we could in their facility. The Simulation Antoine himself accompanied us to assist in the layout of the material to simulate lunar conditions as much as possible, along with Frank Koch and Lasse Hansen from Spaceport Rostock. This involved careful scattering of the dust with various techniques, using mostly gardening and kitchen tools to attempt to recreate the nature of the moon’s surface. Although the simulated regolith is made in such a way as to copy the substance on the moon as closely as possible – by grinding specific types of rock into extremely fine powder – the moon has no atmosphere, and so the dust behaves rather differently than it does here on earth. Because there is no friction to slow the dust down once it becomes airborne, for example after a meteor impact, the surface is riddled with tiny craters. The Danger Likewise due to the lack of atmosphere, the regolith has little to abrade the sharp edges of the dust particles away. This makes the fine power extremely rough and easily scratches any sensitive camera equipment that it comes into contact with, even in the air. It also makes it carcinogenic, so breathing the dust is dangerous to your health. Dealing with this threat was one of the primary challenges of the trip, as we had to wait for the dust to settle (literally) after each arrangement, which took 1-2 hours, and then be careful not to disturb the surface while we scanned it. We were also required to wear N95 face masks while working near the material, and employed several air quality monitors which notified us when we were being too rigorous with the arrangement of the dust. The Process For normal terrestrial scans, it is typical to walk back and forth across the surface you are scanning to capture a dense grid of images. These images are then fed into a photogrammetry software for mesh reconstruction. But as we could not physically walk across the regolith without disturbing dangerous clouds of dust, we constructed a single axis automated gantry which could suspend our camera and flash and automatically scan a row of images. Then from the sides, we could manually move the rig along the other axis. Each 7×4 meter scan took approximately 2-3 hours to capture this way. On the side, we also captured smaller 40cm macro scans of the regolith, intended to be used for smaller-scale renders or in combination with the larger scans to add detail. The Data Each scan consisted of approximately 1500 photos, totaling 1 million megapixels (or a terapixel if you like) and resulted in reconstructed geometry made of 1.7 billion polygons. A screenshot of one of the surface scans. By the end of the week, we had successfully scanned 20 textures. As part of our promise to Antoine, we are also releasing all the raw data under the public domain (CC0) for any other researchers who wish to take advantage of it, or any photogrammetry artists who want to build their own geometry from the scans. The total dataset is ~800GB, but you can download each scan individually: moon_01 + moon_02 (79 GB) moon_03 + moon_04 (87 GB) moon_dusted_01 (34 GB) moon_dusted_02 (48 GB) moon_dusted_03 (41 GB) moon_dusted_04 (38 GB) moon_dusted_05 (34 GB) moon_flat_macro_01 (35 GB) moon_flat_macro_02 (8.1 GB) moon_footprints_01 + moon_footprints_02 (49 GB) moon_macro_01 (38 GB) moon_meteor_01 + moon_meteor_02 (91 GB) moon_rock_01 (5.1 GB) moon_rock_02 (4.4 GB) moon_rock_03 (4.9 GB) moon_rock_04 (4.8 GB) moon_rock_05 (4.6 GB) moon_rock_06 (4.6 GB) moon_rock_07 (4.5 GB) moon_tracks_01 + moon_tracks_02 (40 GB) moon_tracks_03 + moon_tracks_04 (37 GB) Please do let us know if you do anything interesting with this data, we and the Spaceport Rostock team would love to hear about it. If you have any trouble downloading the files, we also have them on a Nextcloud server that we can share with you. Just get in touch and we’ll give you access freely. Additionally, we scanned 7 regular boring terrestrial rocks coated in the regolith to make them appear more like lunar rocks in order to help visual reconstruction of a simulated lunar environment. For fun, we captured an HDRI in the middle of the regolith pit – a precarious adventure – and lit it using their monstrous halogen bulb meant to simulate the high-contrast low-angle lighting often found on the moon. With the light reflected off the white ceiling you don’t quite get the same effect, but it was interesting to capture nonetheless. The Assets Here is the full collection of assets we created in this project: The Demo As with all of Poly Haven’s other asset collections, we like to showcase what artists can do with our assets by creating a render. James took all of the scans that the team has put together over the last two years and built a beautiful simulation of a lunar environment in Blender. The scene file for this render will be made available soon.

OK, so its been a little more than two months since the last Dev Log, but this time, weve got a little more than just progress updates to share!Namaqualand is out!After more than a year in the making, were finally happy to share our latest asset collection!A rocky South African Desert, blooming with wildflowers and succulents.Ive written a more detailed blog post about the trip and the project as a whole as well, which you can read here: https://blog.polyhaven.com/namaqualand/Browse the assetsDownload the scene fileRead more about the projectQwantani HDRI TripAt the Southern point of the Sterkfontein Dam, just shy of the Drakensberg mountains, is a reasonably sized hilltop that sits a short 10-minute hike from a holiday resort I visited several years ago: Qwantani.Jarod and I revisited this location in August for a week with the sole purpose of capturing more HDRIs from the hilltop.The weather was mostly clear the whole week, which is not super exciting, but we did at least capture what we came for (including testing out our new astro lens).Were still working on stitching all the HDRIs, but youll see them released over the next few weeks.Into the Deep End of Game DesignDario, Rico, Greg, Jenelle, JamesIn a blog post I wrote earlier this year, I explained a bit about the idea of Poly Haven getting into game development. But in a nutshell:Were exploring the idea of making video games as a means to prove the usefulness of our assets to show that the assets we make can indeed be used for the purposes we intend them much like how the Blender Studio creates open movies to prove and improve Blender itself.At the same time, wed like to explore if we can use this as a potential method for funding the creation of our 3D assets. Funding a team that makes free content has always been one of our biggest challenges (I did a talk about it a few Blender Conferences ago), and were wondering if selling video games might be a good way to support this.So, starting in October, we jumped into the deep end of game design: a 5-week sprint to make a game, any game, and get a clearer picture of what this idea might look like (and how much were in over our heads).The game that we make this month will be shared exclusively on Patreon to give us some stakes and accountability. Since this is more of a learning experience than a real game project, we wont be publishing the game anywhere else.No one on the team has any experience making games. Working on assets for games, yes, but nothing remotely connected to the task of designing and implementing gameplay at all.We dont intend to become game designers ourselves. Poly Haven, at its core, will remain an asset platform. Rather, we want to be able to relate to and better work with designers and developers we hire or collaborate with in the future.The broad idea is this: Learn a bit about game development this year (through this 5-week sprint and a jam or two) so that next year we can hire some talent and try to make something worthwhilethat suits Poly Havens mission too.Other ProjectsThose are the three big ones, but to give you an update on the other things happening in the background:The moon scans are still in the works, weve made some progress but plan to tackle it fully after the game sprint.The fabric scans are almost there, were just waiting for a final few scans before we can set up the materials in Blender and upload them.My Blender patch for the asset drag&drop handler still hasnt been reviewed, however another similar patch landed which ads a handler for append/linking in general. This could feasibly be used instead for all the features of our add-on that were relying on my patch, so Ill be looking into it soon.Were still planning to recategorize all our models, but since this may have some unknown impact on users on our site and in our add-on, wed like to wait and figure out new categories for textures and HDRIs first too.

Download the scene fileBrowse the assetsAfter more than a year in the making, were finally happy to share our latest asset collection: Namaqualand!Browse the assetsMicro-biomes of South Africa (Source)In September 2023, the Poly Haven team embarked on a journey to the arid desert near the West coast of South Africa specifically to the Goegap Nature Reserve.For a handful of weeks in the year, what is usually a dry and sandy landscape scarred by mining activity transforms into a floral paradise following the spring rains.While we chose this location in the hopes that the sparse desert would be a unique but manageable scanning project, we couldnt pass up the opportunity to try to capture what even local adventurers rarely get to see.As luck would have it, we nailed the timing and saw the landscape covered in innumerable flowers.Jenelle, James, Dario, Jarod, GregAfter surviving the 12-hour drive from Joburg and resting for the night, we kicked off the project with a scouting hike on the first morning to get the lay of the land and begin prioritizing what we needed to capture.That evening, after a gorgeous sunset, we sat down and planned the rest of the week.We were told that the lodgings were completely without electricity, so we came prepared with many spare batteries for all our cameras and flashes, power banks, a small solar-charged battery, and some adapters to charge devices using our 44 SUV as a generator.In the end, though, our unit had a small solar system that provided just enough power to run the fridge and charge our camera gear. We still had to use this sparingly and try to charge as much as possible during the day.While much of the photoscanning happened in the field (literally), we also brought many of the smaller rocks and other debris into a spare bathroom, where we had assembled a black velvet backdrop to scan against with a turntable.With the combination of a black velvet backdrop and a cross-polarized ring flash setup, we can scan objects in the void, producing very high-quality geometry and surface textures with minimal data preprocessing.The ring flash setup, however, is not powerful enough to scan outdoors in direct sunlight, which, of course, is plentiful in the desert.So, we also brought with us our Elinchrom ELB 500 rig, which is strong enough to overpower the sun and also significantly more ergonomic than our ring flash.The final photogrammetry rig we utilized is a motorized single-axis gantry that, in combination with the ring flash, partially automates scanning a 2-3 meter wide area and removes some of the potential for human error.While certainly not necessary, we wanted to test it out before our trip to #TheMoon, which couldnt be scanned any other way and indeed proved invaluable.Its no surprise to anyone that trying to scan plants with photogrammetry is usually futileThis aint gonna work.So, we also captured many photometric stereo scans from plant debris.Most of the plant assets were then created dynamically with Blenders geometry nodes, using a combination of various scan data, references, and many months of hard work.All in all, were very proud of what weve achieved here and the scope of assets that we managed to capture and reproduce. Were happy to share a small slice of our home country with you, and hope that you make something beautiful with our work We learned a lot in the process, both about scanning in the field, how to better prepare next time, and how to process the data and build the assets more efficiently.It may yet be some time before we take on another nature biome project, knowing how much work this has been and how the next one is likely to be even more ambitious. But in the meantime, we have a number of other projects cooking, so stay tuned to this blog and join our Discord to come along on our journey with us.

Fabulous FabricOne of the areas lacking in our texture library is fabric materials.Some years ago, Rob created some photometric stereo scans (what were starting to call light scanning which is less of a tongue twister and harder to confuse with photogrammetry) of fabric materials, which you can find here: https://polyhaven.com/textures/fabric?a=Rob%20TuytelThis is a good start, but if youve ever visited a fabric store (or taken a look inside your closet) you know there are hundreds of types of fabric that were missing.Photogrammetry is usually our primary method of capturing surface geometry and building textures, however, it has its limitations. When there is very little (relatively speaking) height variation in a surface, say for example a polished wooden tabletop, or any fabric, then you end up with a lumpy mess where the photogrammetry tool imagines height details from the image noise or simple errors in calculation.Lumpy scanned normals vs B2M faked normals. Both not great.Essentially, you have to throw away the geometry and use the photogrammetry software as a glorified panorama stitcher, and then create the normal map/height map some other way.Going with the age-old bitmap to material (B2M) technique of fudging the albedo map until you get something that looks a bit like a height map is something we want to avoid.A more accurate method is to keep the camera still and capture multiple images with different light angles, feeding them into a tool like Details Capture to compute the surface normals based on these known light angles.It, too, is an approximation, as things like material color, reflectivity, and translucency can throw it off, but the results are far better than B2M or photogrammetry.B2M (worst)Photogrammetry (eh)Light Scan (pretty great)One challenge with light scanning (photometric stereo) is that youre limited by the resolution of the camera, since the camera doesnt move around like it does in photogrammetry, rather the light moves instead.Even the highest resolution consumer cameras dont reach 8K on the vertical axis.To get around this, you can shoot multiple light scans in a grid pattern with a bit of overlap, process them as separate textures, and then stitch them together again like a panorama. Doing this in a 22 grid with our camera results in slightly more than 8K resolution.PTGui, the software we use for stitching HDRI panoramas, happens to also work amazingly well for this task too as its designed to counter distortion curvatures, blend seams dynamically along natural edges in the image, and work with many gigapixels of data. Its JSON-based project files (or templating system) also make it trivial to stitch the same panorama for both the albedo and normal maps.Side note: We played around a bit with pixel shift as well which can theoretically reach about 12K resolution without moving the camera, however, this tech is very sensitive and we couldn't reliably capture sharp images. In many of our tests, the combined pixel shift image was slightly more blurry than even a single of the lower resolution 16 brackets despite having more pixels. We should be able to solve this with more rigid setups, but then we also have to deal with inconsistencies in flash exposures as well. That could be solved with high-power video lights, but we moved on to the panorama method before investing in this.Were starting to design a workflow around this to use at scale, so we can capture dozens more fabric materials and process them as painlessly as possible. Once were happy with it, well document the workflow on our wiki (like we have all our others) and share it for you to learn from and improve upon.Well likely take the last few months of this year to plan and test things further, and then begin raiding fabric stores early next year.Wood Workshop VisitWood, one of our most popular texture categories!Wood textures are something you can never really have enough of. There are dozens of different species commonly used for furniture and construction, and a seemingly infinite number of ways to lay out planks in patterns for flooring or fences. And what about stains and finishes, roughness and polish, live edge and composites ?While more than 10% of our texture library today is made up of wood materials, Id say we havent even scratched the surface.This is actually the primary reason why we built the C-monster, and we finally got to put it to its intended use last week:We scanned a few veneer boards and piles of sawdust, and will begin processing them later this year when our to-do list is a little shorter. If those work out well, we plan to return to scan a few more types of wood.NamaqualandOur trip to the desert last month was a huge success!It was a bit more lush than we were expecting, but that also meant we could capture a lot of nice little flowers to make things more interesting.We havent yet parsed through our data completely, but Id estimate we have about 50 good assets waiting for us to process.Were also working on a behind-the-scenes video documenting the whole trip, which should be a fun watch Sadly we need to finish up our other projects before we can start work on this collection, but Im already looking forward to seeing the results.Little FallsSpeaking of other projects, Little Falls is next on our list at the moment to finish up. Progress is slow but steady, as weve been preparing for another top-secret mission you can read about on Patreon In the meantime, here are some tasty renders that Rico threw together with the assets hes working on:Hidden AlleyJamess progress on the Hidden Alley scene is coming along great! We should have some more to share soon, but for now here are some sneak peeks:Rigging StandardsYou may have noticed a number of our models have been updated with rigged versions, and affixed with a bone icon in the library:This is thanks to efforts started by Yann Kervran, who has been donating his time to help us rig existing models and come up with good standards for future rigs.A focus for the rigs is to try and be software-agnostic and unopinionated, allowing changes to control elements without needing to redo any mechanical parts of the rigs.Every animator likes their rigs to work a certain way depending on the motion they have planned, so our approach is to create a rig that is broadly useful, but still adaptable.Collection PagesFinally, I spent some time improving the layout of our collection pages, adding a nice image banner and some links for each collection.You may also notice a brand new collection: The Pine Forest.This combines several of our pine and fir tree assets, plus related textures and rocks, into a convenient bundle, also making the scene that Rob created for the project available for download.Well thats it for this Dev Log! Next time well talk more about our top-secret mission and share more progress of all our ongoing projects

Welcome to 2024! We have some exciting plans for this year, but before we can make any grand announcements we need to finish what we started and polish off our previous projects The Hidden AlleyAnother wildly successful community project! You can read about it here, head straight to the assets page, or download the final scene file.Well certainly set up another community project later this year, but for the next few months we need to focus on some other popular projectsLittle Falls Verdant TrailOur latest environment project is just about complete! We decided on a final name for the collection little falls was simply a working title and no longer suitable since there are no falls in our finished scene instead we decided Verdant Trail is more in style with the theme.Heres a small sneak peek, well share more in a few weeks once all the assets are uploaded:Fabric PlansLast time I shared a bit of our big-picture ideas for scanning fabrics at scale.Since then weve been researching some other approaches and testing out a few different workflows that might work at the scale we want, without compromising on quality, nor spending 99% of our effort on 1% gains.Were still ironing out the kinks (though not yet literally), but our plan is to construct a variant of the Cornell box so that we may capture solid physical reference of each fabric sample and use this to aid in the replication of material properties in Blender after weve digitized it with the photometric stereo workflow.This may not be the final design, but the idea is to keep it simple while still providing as much information as possible to aid in discerning the subtle view-dependant material properties that are critical for creating a convincing fabric material such as sheen weight, roughness, subsurface scattering, etc.The fabric sample will be wrapped around a polystyrene sphere and impaled with an aluminum rod to support it on the back wall of the box, like a large leathery lollypop.A two-point light setup gives you a strong, but not too harsh, key light and a rim light in predictable locations.We forego the red and green walls of the traditional Cornell box to avoid confusing the hue of the fabric sample itself. Instead, half the walls are painted white to bounce some light to the underside of the ball, and the rest are dark to keep enough contrast for the diffuse gradient to remain visible.The 18% grey sphere and Macbeth color chart provide an anchor point for exposure and white balance respectively, ensuring we can calibrate the surface albedo accurately.#TheMoonPrior to the Blender Conference, we visited a lunar simulant facility in Rostock, Germany.You can hear more about the project in my lightning talk below, but in a nutshell, the aim is to create relatively small-scale textures of the lunar surface as accurately as we can without actually visiting the moon ourselves.Well likely only get to processing these scans later this year, as we want to first complete the Verdant Trail and Namaqualand collections.Q&A StreamFinally, we hosted a stream at the end of the year to answer some community questions and share some updates and plans:

Download the scene fileBrowse the assetsWere proud to present Poly Havens latest asset collection: A Verdant Trail.Browse the assetsThe goal of this project was to explore the idea of traveling to different biomes and capturing scans over a few days to create a cohesive asset pack that can be used to recreate similar environments.South Africa has an absurd number of biomes within relatively easy reach, so our idea was to see what would be involved in creating an asset pack for each of them one dayMicro-biomes of South Africa, and the location where most of our scans were capturedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetation_types_of_South_AfricaWe first started this project back in April of 2023, slowly gathering references, scouting locations, and planning the scope of the final collection.Reference photo of a boulder we might have scannedOur working title for the project was Little Falls, which is the name of the suburb where we gathered most of our data. We had some grand ideas of rivers and waterfalls as well, which were soon decided to be too much of a time investment for something we cant publish as an asset on Poly Haven.The small riverbed makes for quite a tranquil sceneThis biome, technically a grassland, is extremely common in the highveld of South Africa. Our initial reason for choosing it as our first biome project was that it was very accessible to us. It covers most of our province and were all very familiar with it.Greg is scouting for scannable rocks amongst the grassy outcropOur primary reference was a small rarely-used public park, home to the waterfalls that the suburb is named from. The path is generally overgrown and runs treacherously alongside the polluted river.Rico is trying not to fall off the narrow path into the riverbank belowMoments before Dario gets his shoe stuck in the mudJandre patiently waits for the rest of the team to catch upThere were plenty of rock faces to scan, though much of it was covered in wild grasses and proved a bit challenging to process. We later also visited other nearby parks and reserves to scan more surfaces that were a bit less overgrown.The cliffside would be great to scan, were it not for all the dense foliage obscuring itThere was a wide variety of vegetation and rock types densely packed in this small area, we had to be careful to create a mockup of the final scene and a wishlist of the assets we would really need before going and capturing everything. We wanted to avoid being too overwhelmed for our first biome project.The riverbank is home to a variety of washed-up trash and debris, brought by heavy rains in the summer monthsOverall the project was a great success!There is always more to scan, but we learned a lot about what is required for scanning things in the wild, such that we were able to travel to Namaqualand in September to capture that biome as well. Weve started processing those scans too now, but thats a story for another blog post Until next time, thanks for your continued support on Patreon, and we look forward to seeing what environments you make with our new assets!Rico, Dario & Jandre, on our first location scout.Browse the assets

Another two months flies by, heres what weve been working on:NamaqualandWere making great progress with the Namaqualand project and expect to finish it in the next two months. Hopefully, itll be ready around the next dev log!Its amazing how much work there is after scanning a location for just a week Theres not much more to say other than the team has been hard at work grinding out assets, so heres a little sneak peek:Moon ProgressMeanwhile, Dario has started working on our moon scans in earnest. There will be quite a few of them, and theyre all very similar, but we hope this will give you a lot of flexibility and variation in large environments.FabricIts been a while since I last spoke about our fabric scans project, and plans have changed a bit since then.While assembling the Cornell box and pondering what sort of machine wed build to automate the scanning process itself, we were contacted by a company in Germany, Colormass, that specializes in doing this sort of thing.Colormass offered to scan a small set of fabrics for us, more or less at cost. While still quite a bit more than it would have cost us to do ourselves, it would free up a few months of our time to work on other projects, so we decided it was still a good idea.They are working on a set of 30 scans as we speak, but weve seen 4 of them so far:Model RecategorizationIn more general news, weve spent some time rethinking the categories we use for models. What we have now was thought up many years ago, back in the brief days of 3D Model Haven, when we had less than 50 models in total.Now, the library is considerably larger and more varied, and were a bit tired of calling everything a prop or decorative.While were already fairly happy with the new categories weve created, changing categories for everything all at once has a number of technical implications. There are unanswered questions about how specifically we want the new system to workwhether or not it will be the same for textures and HDRIs, too.The website, our Blender add-on, and any third-party tools using our API all need to work seamlessly while we make the transition, taking into account users who may not have the latest version and are still expecting the old categories. Theres still much to decide and determine here, but I thought Id mention it so youre aware of one of the many aspects of running an asset library besides the act of making the assets themselves Blender Asset Drop HandlerSpeaking of our add-on, I made a patch for Blender 8 months ago that adds a small feature that would allow our add-on to be used more intuitively and efficiently.Quick and dirty proof of concept of what could happen if we had asset drop handlers in #b3d's Python API (my patch: https://t.co/JUDP0ls50U). pic.twitter.com/VLaAsHG1Df Greg Zaal (@GregZaal) May 16, 2024The feature is simply a Python hook into the asset browsers drag-and-drop event, which would allow us to attach our own code to this action. For example, we could download the asset after the user drags it into their scene rather than requiring all users to download all assets upfront, as it currently works.Similarly, we could ask the user what resolution theyd like the asset to be or simply follow some default preference. Currently, our asset always comes in at 1K resolution, and you have to go to a menu to change this after adding it to the scene.There are a number of other features we have in mind that rely on this patch, and its been waiting patiently for review for the last year. Finally, there has been some activity, and other developers have been working on similar patches and more general implementations, so its possible we may finally get to see these features in Blender soon Better Astro-HDRIs?Finally, a bit of a teaseOne of our most requested types of HDRIs are night HDRIs. We have a few, and a few more on the way from Namaqualand, but since shooting those weve realized our current lens is a bit soft.Its not bad, the image above being the worst case I could find, but the poor coma coupled with the relatively high level of noise (due to the limit of 15s exposures to avoid star trails) there is definitely some room for improvement.Luckily, Sigma recently released a new lens that blows every other potential astro-HDRI lens out of the water: the 14mm f/1.4 Art.Not only is this lens twice as bright as our current lens, meaning theoretically half as much noise, but its also on another level of sharpness wide open.Nikon Z7 + Laowa 15mm F/2Sony a7R4 + Sigma 14mm F/1.4We visited a local camera store and shot a few tests, albeit during the day, and came to the conclusion that we needed this We have an HDRI trip planned for the end of August, where well put it to the test and hopefully capture the best starry skies anyone has ever seen in an HDRI.Assuming the weather plays nicely with us.Thanks for reading this far! We look forward to sharing more exciting progress in the next Dev Log Until then, feel free to join us on Discord where we are always hanging out, and let us know what you are working on too!

Growing the TeamThanks to our Blender Add-on, we are able to grow the core team and in April we were joined by Jandre van Heerden!Jandre is working on all sorts of technical tasks and helping us improve and automate our processes. Youve probably seen some of his scans already!This brings our full-time team to 5 people Also joining the team this month were Odin and Pan:Theyre a little less productive when it comes to making 3D assets, but weve decided to keep them on for moral support.Hidden AlleyOur latest community project, the Hidden Alley, was again a great success! Voting has just begun to determine the prize order, while James is continuing work on the scene and asset uploads.Little FallsWere making good progress on the Little Falls project, starting to process some scans and making plans for more trips well need to capture others.The location we chose is a little inaccessible and challenging to capture good scans, so well be visiting a few other parks and hills to get gather some more content from similar biomes.Mountain PinesOur Mountain Pines project is also making great progress and is almost ready to share. Many of the assets are already online, and weve got just a few left to finish up before we can share the scene file.Smugglers Cove BacklogWe have a few environment scans that made it into the Smugglers Cove asset pack on the Unreal Marketplace that we havent yet shared on polyhaven.com, like the one above. This was mainly due to them requiring some more work to be usable in Blender, while in Unreal Nanite could practically render the pure scan.Rico is now finishing up these assets so we can share them with everyone Elinchrom Flash RigOne of the first things that Jandre and I worked on last month was a rig for our new Elinchrom ELB 500 flash.We already use a Godox AR400 which is great in most cases, but we found we needed something brighter with batteries (and temperature restrictions) that could last longer, in order to be able to do scans in broad daylight.The ELB 500 is great for this, though it requires a custom mounting solution to get it usable for mobile cross-polarized photogrammetry.We 3D printed most of this, designed around a simple cage we found locally. The design is not quite refined or generic enough for us to share here, Im expecting to make a few revisions once we use it a bit more in the field.Texture Color CalibrationWeve finally formalized and standardized our diffuse map color calibration workflow using Macbeth charts.This was always a confusing issue for all of us, core team and contractors alike, but weve stuck our heads together and come up with a reliable and simple method to ensure the consistency and accuracy of our future texture scans.UncalibratedCalibratedThe difference it makes can be quite dramatic, and I only wish we could go back in time and improve all of our past work as well.Were off the gridOr solar installation was completed a few weeks ago and its been great having electricity 24/7 again.The size of the system is just enough to keep the office going during overcast days, and even run a heater or two while the sun is out.As luck would have it, now we have to deal with water outages too! This will be the second one in as many weeks, only this time its planned to last for 5 days instead of only one. Depending on how things go in the future months, we may need to opt for a borehole as well, but well cross that bridge when we come to it.