It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Nack: Single-Flash 16-bit Surface Scanning. Is Photogrammetry overkill for micro-details?
Hi Polycount!
I’ve spent the last year obsessed with a single problem: Why do we need to take 50+ photos and wait for cloud processing just to capture the surface of a brick or a piece of wood?
I’m developing Nack — an Android tool that uses Shape-from-Shading (SfS) to reconstruct geometry from a single flash photo. No LiDAR, no cloud, no tripod. Just one "click" and you get raw 16-bit data.
Why I think this matters: Traditional photogrammetry often struggles with micro-reliefs (it "blurs" them or creates noise) and requires a perfect setup. Nack analyzes light-shadow falloff from the phone's flash to reconstruct the surface at a sub-millimeter scale.
Key Specs:
16-bit Depth Maps (PNG): Ready for ZBrush displacement.
Instant Normal Maps: High-frequency detail capture.
On-device processing: All math happens in OpenCV locally.
The "Proof" (Compare for yourself): 
https://youtu.be/ORexhPYd4wA
I’m looking for a "Stress Test": I’ve put a Free Demo on Gumroad. I want to see if this can handle the most complex surfaces you guys can find. Try it on concrete, fabric, or old tree bark and post your bakes here. I’m ready for brutal feedback.
Get the Demo / Full Version: [https://rkey.gumroad.com/l/sdohp]
Current Goal: Improve the Poisson solver for even cleaner maps. Let me know what you think about the reconstruction fidelity!
Replies
🚀 NACK — Mobile Real-World Capture Tool
NACK is an offline mobile tool that transforms real-world surfaces and objects into digital data.
Using only a smartphone, NACK allows you to capture textures, surface detail, depth information, and material properties — and instantly turn them into usable digital assets or analysis data.
NACK is designed as a fast, portable, offline scanning solution for both creative and industrial workflows.
🌍 What is NACK used for?
NACK is not limited to one industry. It is a real-world digitization platform.
🎮 Game Development & 3D Content
NACK enables fast creation of:
Realistic textures & materials
Environment surfaces
Props & scanned assets
Decals and surface details
Use cases:
Indie games
Mobile games
PC/console environments
VR/AR projects
Value:
Faster asset production
Unique real-world look
No studio or expensive scanners needed
🧱 VFX, Film & Virtual Production
NACK helps capture:
Walls, ground, fabrics, metals
Destruction details
Grunge and surface noise
Environment references
Use cases:
Set extensions
Digital doubles
Virtual stages
Background environments
Value:
Rapid on-set scanning
Real surface fidelity
Portable capture pipeline
🏗 Architecture, Archviz & Design
NACK can be used to digitize:
Building materials
Floors, walls, facades
Interior surfaces
Heritage elements
Use cases:
Visualization
Restoration
Documentation
Virtual showrooms
Value:
Accurate real-world materials
Quick environment capture
Asset libraries for studios
🏭 Industrial Inspection & Quality Control
NACK can act as a mobile surface inspection and documentation tool.
Potential applications:
Weld seam surface documentation
Surface deformation capture
Wear and damage tracking
Visual quality inspection
Before/after comparison
Defect visualization
Industries:
Manufacturing
Welding & metal construction
Oil & gas
Infrastructure
Technical inspection
Value:
Portable inspection tool
Fast field documentation
Digital reports
Cost-effective alternative to bulky scanners
(Pre-inspection, documentation, and surface analysis — not a replacement for certified NDT equipment.)
🔧 Welding & Metalwork
NACK can assist in:
Visual weld seam analysis
Surface relief capture
Geometry and profile observation
Documentation for QA
Remote inspection workflows
Value:
Instant capture on site
Visual surface maps
Digital weld history
Reduced manual reporting
🏪 E-commerce & Product Digitization
NACK can be used to capture:
Materials and fabrics
Furniture surfaces
Decorative elements
Physical product textures
Use cases:
Product visualization
AR previews
3D catalogs
Virtual showrooms
Value:
Faster content production
Reduced studio costs
Real-world accuracy
🏛 Education, Science & Documentation
NACK supports:
Field research
Archaeology & geology
Material studies
Digital archiving
Training environments
Value:
Pocket-size capture lab
Offline work
Fast digitalization
🔑 Core Advantages of NACK
📱 Mobile & portable
⚡ Fast processing
🔌 Works offline
🧠 Real-world to digital
🏭 Suitable for creative and industrial tasks
💰 Cost-effective alternative to specialized hardware
🎯 NACK’s mission
To make real-world digitization accessible to everyone —
from indie developers to engineers, from artists to industrial teams.
NACK turns your phone into a capture device for the physical world.
Great observation! You're right that classic SfS thrives on uniform albedo and diffuse surfaces. However, Nack isn't strictly limited to small patches.
Scale: The 1x1m limit is mostly a 'flash power' constraint. For a 10-meter rocky mound, the Sun becomes the perfect directional light source. As long as there's a clear angle of incidence, the math holds up—whether it's a 1cm coin or a 10m cliff.
Sunlight: Actually, the sun is an even better light source than a phone flash because it provides perfectly parallel rays. Processing a roadside texture under direct sunlight is one of our target use cases for large-scale environment scanning.
Color: While 'same color' is the ideal 'lab condition', Nack's preprocessing handles real-world textures (like rock or skin) by focusing on high-frequency surface gradients rather than flat color shifts.
Nack is about bringing high-end surface analysis out of the lab and into the field—at any scale.
Great questions!
Tiled textures: Yes, seamless tiling is definitely on the roadmap. I'm currently working on an algorithm for automatic edge-blending to ensure textures can be used on large surfaces without visible seams.PBR elements (Roughness/Metalness): The app already extracts high-quality Geometry (Normals/Depth) and Ambient Occlusion. Roughness and Metalness are the next steps. I’m planning to implement them by analyzing specular reflections from the flash—this will allow the app to distinguish between matte and glossy areas without needing heavy AI models.
Stay tuned, Nack is evolving into a full PBR material creator!
I totally feel you on Tandent LightBrush. It was legendary, but single-image decomposition is always a bit of a gamble because the math is fundamentally underdetermined.I'm taking a different path to avoid the 'bag of batteries' setup. My approach relies on multi-state lighting analysis. By capturing the delta between different illumination environments, I can effectively suppress the ambient 'noise' and isolate the surface response.Regarding the albedo/geometry separation—which is the biggest headache—I've developed a custom normalization pass that decouples surface reflectance from the actual relief. It’s not just a simple subtraction; it’s a way to neutralize the texture so that high-contrast details don’t corrupt the spatial data.For the final reconstruction, I’m using a frequency-domain integration with specific boundary handling to fix those 'tiled' or 'blanket' artifacts you usually see in SfS. It’s definitely a step up from the generic 'black-box' tools like Adobe Sampler because it actually treats the light as a known vector rather than guessing.