CD Projekt Red's Technical Artist Unveils PBR Solver For 3D Scans

Piotr Bieryt, Senior Technical Artist at CD Projekt Red and co-founder of INVOLV3D, announced the company's new PBR solver, sigmaPBR, which is currently in closed beta.

The idea is that while photogrammetry can capture an object's geometry and surface color, it doesn't capture exactly how the material reacts to light, roughness, and tiny surface details, these must still be recreated manually. sigmaPBR takes photometric and photogrammetry data and generates a full set of PBR material maps, allowing the resulting 3D asset to be realistically "relit" under different lighting conditions.

The final material stack includes diffuse albedo, roughness, specular F0, and normal maps. The textures stay aligned with the existing production UV atlas, with both world-space and tangent-space normal options available for common rendering workflows.

sigmaPBR currently supports a wide range of photometric capture setups, from robotic scanning rigs and turntable-based systems to 2D material scanners and handheld setups, including Godox AR400-based rigs. It targets studios doing, for example, product and asset digitization, like cultural heritage, that want production-ready, relightable materials instead of manually hand-painting roughness/specular maps.

INVOLV3D currently offers a free evaluation: send your capture setup details, and they run a test material solve on your data. Learn more here.