[Music] [Chris Hillyer] All right. We're going to get started. My name is Chris Hillyer. I'm a Product Manager for HP. And we have a really amazing new product downstairs that we want to introduce you to. How many of you have heard of Captis thus far? Anyone? Yeah. I'm seeing a couple employees here. That's not fair. All right. So not everyone, which is great. And what a Captis is? If you haven't heard anything, it's a digital capture device for materials. So we run into issues all of the time in industry trying to acquire digital assets based on real things. And what this does is it automates that whole process, and it was done in partnership with Adobe. And so we have some-- Because we don't have the device up here, I'm going to show you just a quick little video which explains a little bit of what this whole thing looks like. So we're going to start with that.
So our friend Guillaume in Lyon, he's actually downstairs, I think, right? He is. I have compliment him on his hair.
So you're able to put this material on the bed of this device. It's a 30x30 centimeter area which has its backlit which means you're actually acquiring the opacity information for that material.
You can see the little lights triggering in there taking over 2,000 images of that material, and then you can see it's acquiring that 3D material. It's all done by maps if you're not familiar with 3D workflow. So obviously, we're going to have guests with very different backgrounds, which is part of why we have such a fun group up here. I'm going to introduce them, and then I'm going to have them talk a little bit about what they do. And then I'm going to ask them a couple questions about how they're using Captis and how it's revolutionizing their workflows. So we're going to start off with Davoud Ohadi. Davoud is in the middle there. And he's working with Lululemon for 3D Footwear. And he's been in the footwear industry for years and years and years leading 3D teams. So a very distinguished person to have on our panel here. Next, we'll have Laura Vitolina. Is that close enough? I tried and tried. I don't know. I don't believe that's close enough, but it's going to work today.
And Laura works for Adobe. She was actually at the launch of Captis in Denver at SIGGRAPH in July. And what's great is with this partnership with Adobe, they share some of their designers to come over and help demonstrate the device to people. And it's fun to watch these creative people who are so familiar with the Adobe Suite, the Substance Suite jumping into using this new tool to improve the workflow. So she has a very different take on how to use this device than Davoud. And then finally, Kevin Peter He, coming from Brooklyn, is the Creative Director of ZeroSpace. And if you go downstairs and visit the HP booth, we have a ZeroSpace demo and he's going to show us a little bit about what ZeroSpace is and how Captis helps him with his workflow as well. So we're going to start off with Davoud talking a little bit about who he is and what he does.
Cue, the only picture that Lululemon would let him show.
[Davoud Ohadi] Hi, so I'm Davoud Ohadi, a 3D design-- Oops, sorry, not familiar with the mic, so, yeah, 3D Design Director for Footwear at Lululemon.
My job is looking at I'm implementing the 3D workflow for footwear.
And I'm looking from early concept creation, and I'm trying to push it to consumer-facing. So this one is the only one I'm allowed to show because it has been launched from the team. So on this one, I created the asset and shared that with the brand team, so they can put that in front of the consumer. Roughly, I've been in the 3D industry for a while. I did almost everything. I started with engineering, and was not creative enough for me, so I switched to design. And I define myself as a translator between engineer and designer, what engineer can do and what designer wants. So that's me in between, and I'm also always looking at workflow and try to simplify the workflow to be able to give 3D tool to people who are not used to it. So that's roughly in a nutshell me.
Perfect. Thank you. All right, next up, Laura can speak a little bit about her background and what she likes to create.
[Laura Vitolina] Hi, everybody, my name is Laura Vitolina, and I'm a 3D designer, 3D artist on the Adobe team, specifically on the art and development team. And so our team works really closely with the product itself. And then also, we visit customers. We also participate in conferences and listen to all of the feedback that's there. And also I'm a practicing artist. And so when all of that comes together, we can assist product managers and engineers on how tools are created. So all of these projects are created within Adobe. Whenever there's a conference, we normally launch something interesting, something like a new feature of a product. And that's my creative experiment is to understand how to stretch the tool. Also we work alongside engineers and they always try to listen to us of how to make things more artist-friendly or, for example, as an artist, I use a lot of different tools and what are the things that we would like to implement? And then here you have few of the examples that I presented at SIGGRAPH or GDC.
Sometimes I explore beads. For a while, I was really into-- I was like, "How can we make beads that look organic?" Because a lot of times you have something that comes automatic and the lines are very perfect and it makes it look very digital. And so for me, for a while, I was like, "I really want to make sure that there's like a path tool." Painter team actually launched that tool earlier this year where you can by hand, select and load the beads in, and then create your own designs. So I did that for a while and then was very into photogrammetry, it's 3D capture for about, I think, a year. I was just scanning everything in museums and sculptures and just anything I wanted in house, like food, my sandwich, my breakfast, and then just really anything. And then you can see the artichoke project where we were launching a different type of stylization tool. But then since I've been going to farmers' markets religiously, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, these vegetables are so beautiful. Why don't I scan them?" And then that's how that project came along. So it's very much what I'm interested in, but then also combining it with the things. And then most importantly, I am Latvian. It's a really small country in Europe, and I try to connect my work sometimes with my culture. I really miss home. I live in San Francisco, so I sometimes try to echo my culture through work. And so at the same time, we were-- That's the Crown project by the way. So it's a very traditional ethnic costume that we use for singing and dancing. And so I went to this ginormous song and dance festival in Latvia and I was inspired by the costumes they have. But I was like, "Okay, this is looking really medieval. Maybe there's a way for me to change the color or change the materials to make it a bit more modern." And then I also was using the path tool, and that's how I'm able to be creative, still help build product, but then also like to talk about my country and my culture as well. And then we have another example that we presented this year. So this is a project where we really just explored materials. As Chris mentioned, we built together HP Captis, and so Adobe Substance 3D Sampler software running behind the amazing device. And so there we could just go into the material world. I'm very crafty. I do any types of art. And so I went to different types of fabric stores, and I was like, "Well, how can I show different types of materials and beauty of it in digital space?" I like that in digital space, anything you dream of, you can probably make. And then when Captis came around, I just thought it was so beautiful how it captures the materials. When you make a digital material, it's always very perfect, you know? And so I think with Captis, it takes the material as is, and so it looks more realistic. So we were playing with the opacity and things like that, so you could discover little eggs in the materials as you scan them. And yeah, that was my last project, and it spells out Adobe because we were presenting it at the HP booth. So yeah, that's what I do.
Beautiful. All right. And then we're going to move on to Kevin, and we're going to start with a little video.
[Woman] Today, I'm at ZeroSpace Studios in New York. [Man] The old rules about how media gets made are basically re-written. [Music] [Kevin Peter He] Cool. So my name is Kevin, and I'm the Creative Director of ZeroSpace. We are an XR production creative studio located in Brooklyn. We have a suite of tools available at the space, including a 60-foot virtual production LED wall, a Vicon motion capture system where basically people put you in the suits and the little dots, and you become digital avatars. We also have a markerless system that is running at the HP booth downstairs, where you don't need to wear a suit, and it uses AI and pure optical tracking, where you step in and you just become an avatar immediately.
And then volumetric capture and a whole suite of things. I think what's interesting to us, is the sense of embodied virtuality.
The 3D workflow is taking in the real world and processing it, trying to replicate it or change it.
We constantly think about when the real world becomes virtual, how do we push it further? How do we make connections back to the real world, and then how do we introduce those things in formats for the audience, either in real-time, or in video, or other formats? So the project that we're showcasing right now that we did with Captis was-- So prior to ZeroSpace, I had a background stint as a fashion designer, at a Avant Garde menswear brand, and I had a friend in the industry, I don't do that anymore, but a friend in the industry has a brand called Kozaburo, that's based in Brooklyn. He won the LVMH Prize back in 2018 and he develops these really amazing fabrics in Japan that are all original. So a lot of them are-- So in the right side one, you can see that little pattern. It's something called-- So in traditional Japanese fabrics, there's something called Sashiko stitching, where they essentially reinforce stitching to make the fabric much more durable. It's a very, very old process. And he worked with a mill to develop one that's in hexagonal shape that retains the structural rigidity of the fabric a lot better. So we were able to use the Captis system to scan them and then essentially work with some digital humans that we actually scan. So all of this is a virtual image. None of that is real, and then just simulate it and take some beauty shots straight out of-- This is using Unreal Engine. So we can go to the next, some details. And a lot of what I talk about digital materiality or embodied virtuality is I think the way that we perceive images too is not just limited to the material itself. It's influenced by light. It's influenced by the camera that we use, the sensor that we use, the film back that we're simulating. So all of this stuff is considered in the work that we do in producing an image to blur the balance a little bit between reality and virtuality. Yeah. Just speed through them. That's it.
Really incredible images. I think we're all drooling over here about the work that he's done here.
All right. Back to the machine. So we have a partnership with Adobe, and our mission is to capture all the world's materials. And so we're going to talk to the panelists a little bit about this device and really how they use digital materials in their process and how this is changing that. So we'll start off with Davoud. So how do you use digital materials in your creative process? You're first. Okay, I'm first.
So the way I use material, digital material for me is more like, in terms of virtual sample in the first place is just like iterate, see any material we can find into our library, and just those that did in the scanner and just apply that directly between mixing. And it's really creative. It's just like no limit. It's just like at the beginning, it's just how can we vision the shoe and yeah, mix and match a bunch of material and try to get inspiration based on our material library or any anywhere we find a new fabric. It's like, "Oh, this is cool. How can we apply it?" So we just scan it and run to the virtual sample. And I also when I was explaining earlier, my vision is early concentration all the way to consumer-facing. That also give me the perfect setup where I can share when we have the final sample, the final physical sample is also like creating the virtual sample who is going to be perfect. There is no difference. When we talk about digital training, it's like basically same same. So when we put that in front of the consumer, I know I'm not lying. I was like, "I cannot getting someone." This is like, "Hey, but what you shown the image is not accurate to the product I buy." So it's really like blending those two worlds to communicate further. So that's how I see it. So the two main one for me is early concept creation and consumer-facing.
Definitely thinking in the future also how to communicate better with factory when we sampling and just go crazy on new idea and mixing and blending material for some result.
Great. Yeah. So I think, I've a little bit of history in footwear. So Davoud and I have, I think very similar experiences with that, but you can imagine the idea of creating a shoe or a garment in that respect and how challenging it is to imagine what that product is going to look like upfront. And so obviously by having the fidelity of being able to have this 3D scan, you're able to see what that would look like so much earlier in the process, but I think to Davoud's point, you're also able to use that asset all the way through to something that could show up on social media or show up in that advertisement like they showed on the web page. So that's how end-to-end this opportunity is. Shifting over to you, how do you use digital materials in your creative process? You spoke to little bit. I did. I did. Yeah. So sometimes very experimental, sometimes, yeah, going to the store, finding the right fabrics, seeing how it can work with them. And mostly what we've been talking about also is fabric materials, but what I've lately been experimenting with is having paper, maybe, especially with Japanese paper. Last year, I went to Japan, picked up a bunch of interesting papers, and they have different types of transparencies, and you can see different types of specs. And then, well, how about I apply this material to a 3D lighthouse, and then it turns into an actual lighthouse where I have light inside and see how each paper, this is my next project, how each paper interacts in the digital light. And it's nice to not build the actual house from 3D, but actually have something in a video, or maybe there's motion added to it. So very much telling a story with materials, or models, or light, and then also work-wise, just visualizing something. If you're more familiar with having materials in 3D, you go into painter, you have to bake, and you have to make digital seem more realistic. And as I mentioned before, Captis does capture all the little imperfections of a material and it makes the digital look even more believable. And so right now, also downstairs, we have a 3D booth, and we have a project running where there's a girl walking in a big city. And so all of her materials are very much scanned with Captis, and it makes her seem believable. She's stylized, it's like an invented environment, but because you have something that comes back to reality, she has jean pants and it looks just like jeans or like a knit, so that's what I've been really, really enjoying, and especially with Captis. One of the things when I first tried working on it, I just love that it has opacity map. It's something normally where you can't really get that whenever you take a picture of a material, especially if you have silk or some material that has little holes in them and everything, and they're just uneven holes. So it just adds to reality and it helps you tell a story of your artwork. It's more believable. So that's how I use it. Yeah. Thank you. I love-- The panelists are so great because they come from such different backgrounds. But, Kevin, tell us a little bit about how you use digital materials. And I mean, you already have told us. I know these are a little redundant, but I think just elaborate a little bit more about what that means for your workflows and where you see it going. I mean, I think I want to elaborate on what Laura was talking about.
I think when we think about digital and real, there's almost this at the end of the day, your perception is somewhat impressionistic. There is reality, and then you feel like it's real, but you can't quite tell. And I think that all of these parameters are little sliders that almost change this end equilibrium point to how far from reality do you get? How close to reality do you get? And what I mean by that is, I think, what's interesting about Captis is we have all of these variables, like opacity maps, things like that. I think when I'm working with digital materials, I want it to be uniquely digital. I'm not dealing with-- My product doesn't look like the one that you showed online. So that's a very practical concern. But if I'm working with digital materials, I wanted to push it further. But then how do I not make it so escapist and way too much? So how do I dial it back? So do I use the real Addebito maps, like the real textures, but then use a very, like, push the opacity way further? Do I add emission to it? Do I add metallic to it? Playing with those different parameters to generate something uniquely a mix of reality and imagination, I think is what's interesting.
Yeah. You guys are very well prepared. Thank you. Moving on, we're going to talk one element of Captis.
HP didn't invent digital material acquisition, but it's one really important part about it is how difficult it traditionally has been to acquire these materials. So one thing that we love so much about Captis is how easy and how simple it is and obviously so much about that is its interface with Adobe Substance. Next question, Davoud, is like what type of materials do you want to capture with your Captis? Kind of everything. Mainly focusing on fabric.
Like I say, we have a huge library, and we're getting sample all of the time. So it's definitely mainly fabric.
Art like, plastic and all this stuff is probably going to be more complicated because most of the time, that was already molded. So it's more complicated, but more like fabric for me is that the biggest, yeah, thing I want to-- Textiles, synthetic leathers? Yeah. Real leathers? Not real leather.
- We cannot use leathers. - You're not allowed to say. Yeah. Well, with that's part of our communication. - So-- - Yeah. - We-- Yeah. So-- - Like shoelaces. I mean, anything that you-- Anything was just like make my life easier. I was just take it and put it into a scanner, and in five minutes, it scans. So it's increased the capability of sampling faster. So that's how everything I can, everything is flattish. I put it in a scanner and just apply into a 3D file as well. Fantastic. All right. Laura, you spoke about paper. All right, are there other things that you're curious about putting in there? - Yes. - Pretzels? We-- Yes. During SIGGRAPH, we had a happy hour. We did start to do the snacks. But really anything, that's where I think I would have tried is I pressed some clay on a transparent paper to get the fingerprints and the-- If you're familiar with 3D subsurface scattering, you could get certain areas are more thinner and thicker. So I've tried that. And then, I tried it to do some fuzzy materials, but I knew that that's not going to work. But yeah, also it's just like assembling something. That's what we also did at SIGGRAPH is we would assemble something on the spot in the Captis device and see how it shows up on different types of models, how it would, lay it on the UV maps and things like that. So very much the things you're not supposed to-- Oh, I scanned my paintings to see the brushstrokes on each of them because it gives you a really good height and normal map. So for me, seeing actually those brushstrokes and maybe then making into a brush or something like that and then further on, like, building something on top of it, on top of it, on top of it. So yeah. But also the materials. I love lace and things like that. So the project that we did is you could see a model, but you can also see through it with lace, and that was amazing. I haven't seen that before, and it was really exciting. So yeah. Fantastic. All right. Kevin? I'm going to grab something really quick. Hold on. Sorry.
This is a cardigan from that designer, one of his knit pieces. So I think fabrics with more dimensionality is interesting, especially some softwares have displacement and some don't. So thinking about how do you actually add dimensionality to it, not just using normals to fake dimensionality. And then, also, I think bigger canvas bed would be interesting. One of the materials that the designer had was actually jacquard, denim, but the jacquard part was calligraphy, and the letters were really big, and they went beyond the bed. So then thinking about how does that work? But maybe there are other software solutions that can fill that in. So yeah. Yeah. That's great. All right.
And then if you had a good break, you ready for another question, Davoud? - Nope. - All right. So obviously there's tremendous efficiencies to this as well. So another one of our little key phrases is digitize more, waste less. So you can imagine in footwear, for instance, thousands and thousands of materials available to you that would take-- You'd fill up parking lots filled with shoes just to find samples of each variation. So being able to digitize that can be tremendously efficient. But maybe you can speak a little bit to how this is benefiting you from a business organization or within your own workflow because obviously, it's not new for you, but it's something that's essential. Yeah. It's definitely not new. I was thinking, like, invited eager to speak. I was just going into my mind. It's like how do we used to do it? And I was thinking about crazy bump. You probably don't-- I don't know if you all know that, but it was like a software. We use it long time ago. We just like getting an image, drag and drop it, and it was like creating all of those map was not perfect. And since then, technically, I've changed so much. I was thinking about talking with Adobe long time ago when they had the little prototype, and I'm sure that's the premise of Captis, the little prototype where you could build your own material scanner into your room based on cardboard. It was-- And so we came up from far. Now this is definitely give me a lot of precision, and what I see is basically is what I get in the digital world. So that's really helping me to creating a virtual sample I was talking about earlier, like faster, iterate, faster. And because as you probably know, it's like you get the sample, and shipping the sample, getting this in your end take time, yeah, take time travel and all those things. So it's also a way to reduce those thing and getting decision faster and putting this also into this world now where everybody is like we have office in multiple city is like making decision faster. Just adding the sample, virtual sample into virtual meeting and just judgment, judging on what the action we need to go. So that definitely smoothes the process of this, and we can also compare and starting to swapping color more efficiently. Yeah, really increase the potential of speed and-- Well, when I say speed, it's really interesting. It's just like I feel the lifetime is still the same, but is allow us to push further into the conversation and iterate more and more and more until the deadline. So it's definitely helped to get a better product on the market.
That's great, yeah, one thing we say is trying to take this procedure out of the laboratory and into the designer's hands and really democratizing how much you can do and the efficiency of that.
Laura, maybe not as concerned about time, but you've spoken a little bit about what type of things, how this is benefiting your process and opening the door for you to be able to try new things. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit or-- Yeah. I mean, I think it's the same thing. It's very much, it's efficient and having a library of materials to work with and not creating them fully from scratch because Adobe Substance maybe if you're familiar, you can make note based materials and it takes a bit of time to gather that. So for me, having a library to experiment with is the main thing. And working with Captis is nice. I just turn it on, put it to the side, and then I can experiment with the models itself and things like that. So yeah, very efficiency and time has been such a positive thing out of this. So yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
And then Kevin, obviously, you have coming from a little bit different perspective, but how is Captis helping ZeroSpace or you as an artist? How are you benefiting from having a device like that that's giving you the opportunity to collect digital representation so quickly? It's helped a lot because I think clients come to us, and they want show doubles or representations and so we've worked on a lot of workflows with face scanning and motion capture, which is replicating movement and then people's clothing and style, and that's a huge part to people's identities. So that's played a huge role in our work. All right. Fantastic. There's a little video here that we're going to show at the end talking about SIGGRAPH, and the launch event there, and then we can open it up to some questions.
[Music] [Sébastien Deguy] Today, we're happy to announce the availability of HP Z Captis and a new version of Substance 3D Sampler that is connected to it. HP Z Captis is a device that lets you capture physical materials and turn that into a digital version of such material that you can visualize and prepare and finalize in Substance 3D Sampler. [Pierre Maheut] We started to have our own do-it-yourself device, and then we wanted to move forward and have a true device officially on the market. And we started to engage with the key players about it. And HP was an obvious partner for that. They know how to do hardware, we know how to do software, and we both wanted to address the metal scanning market. So that's what we did. [Joshua St. John] The Substance community is so full of creativity. We've been inspired at the HP side by what we see there. Combining the Substance 3D workflow with application specific hardware to really solve a pain point in all of these creators, day and lives was an opportunity we couldn't pass up. It's simple. You push a button and there's a basically a dark room inside of this Captis device that Adobe sits inside of. And HP we take lots and lots of pictures in different lighting conditions and Adobe takes those pictures and develops them into digital materials. For the user, it's seamless. They don't know any of that's going on, and at the end, they just get digital materials directly in Sampler. [Jerome Derel] The vision is to democratize materials. Big companies have dedicated department or dedicated people to do that, but it's not widely used. And all the companies are not doing that. The goal is to deploy those devices everywhere and hopefully, directly to the supply chain. So then the companies that are making materials will be able to scan and provide directly digital twins. The combination of the HP Z Captis and Substance 3D Sampler is really this one-click solution to go from a physical material to a digital material in the highest quality possible.
Thank you.
[Music]
