Adobe Researchers recently teamed up with colleagues at HP to co-design a new device that can quickly scan the properties of physical materials to create high-quality digital materials.
Designers use digital materials to apply color, pattern, sheen, and texture to 3D objects—but designing digital materials by hand is difficult, and capturing the look and feel of real-world objects can be cumbersome and expensive.
The sleek new device, called the HP Z Captis and manufactured by HP, is small enough to fit on a desktop and powerful enough to capture all of the details needed for professional-quality 3D work. With digital materials in hand, 3D designers can create extremely realistic renderings of real-world products, or they have the flexibility to edit and combine materials to create entirely new 3D worlds. This project is one of the many ways that Adobe Researchers are helping to make it easier for 3D designers to create and edit rich digital materials.
The HP Z Captis is already making waves in the industry. Most recently, it was recognized by the CES 2025 Innovations Awards® for “revolutionizing material digitization across industries including architecture, automotive, entertainment, fashion, and gaming.”
An easier, more flexible way to capture digital materials from the real world
According to Jérôme Derel, Senior Research Engineer at Adobe and one of the main contributors to the project, the HP Z Captis was designed with ease-of-use in mind: “You just need to have a material, position it well, and push a button—that’s it.”
As the user gets started with a capture, a preview feature allows them to make sure everything is arranged as they want it to be, and from there, they can watch the entire process as it’s happening on the device. Since the HP Z Captis is natively integrated into Adobe Substance 3D Sampler, the new digital material is immediately available and ready to be applied to any 3D object on its own, or layered with other colors and patterns.
The digital materials are ideal for sophisticated product renderings. For example, auto designers can apply a precise digital match of a particular leather to a 3D image of the interior of a car, or fashion designers can apply a textile to a piece of clothing. The materials can also be edited and combined to create unique new textures.
“The flexibility is something I really love about the HP Z Captis,” says Derel. “Usually, you have a hand-held device that can do some things but not others—or a big machine that takes up half the room, which means there’s a lot you can’t do since you can’t move it. The Captis is different because you can have it on your desk, or you can bring it with you. You can capture traditional things, or take it into the forest, or anywhere you want.”
The HP Z Captis also offers flexibility in the types and sizes of materials users can capture. While a relatively flat sample that’s about 30 centimeters across and less than a centimeter thick is a perfect fit, the device can be lifted up and placed on top of a material that can’t fit. This is critical for materials that aren’t portable, or would be expensive or difficult to cut to size.
The HP Z Captis has just become available to the general public, but customers in the early evaluation program have been using the beta versions for several years. Substance 3D Sampler 5.0. with HP Z Captis was released in February 2025. HP Z Captis makes it easy to integrate high-quality, customizable materials into any 3D workflow, enabling new powers for creators. To learn more about how to work with HP Z Captis and Substance 3D Sampler, check out this Adobe blog post.
The research—and challenges—behind creating the HP Z Captis
The work behind the HP Z Captis began several years ago when some of Adobe’s 3D researchers were exploring hardware that could scan physical materials for digital use. They experimented with a range of options, from custom setups in photo studios to simple smartphone camera approaches, “but nothing would scale in the end,” remembers Derel.
“The solutions we tried were too expensive, or users were going to need too many skills, or it just took too much time—which would be okay if you were capturing a few materials, but you wouldn’t want to do it a thousand times. In the end, we realized we needed a partner on the hardware side,” Derel says.
Then, in 2018, Adobe Researchers met Joshua St. John, a Product Director from HP who attracted a team of researchers and the two groups quickly came up with a plan to experiment and develop a device together. One of their early prototypes was a big hit at Adobe MAX in 2019, and that motivated the teams to begin developing a product with customers in mind.
From there, the researchers began meeting twice a week virtually and gathering several times a year for intense in-person workshops. The HP team focused on hardware, tackling challenges like finding the right lights and best components to make the system work together as a whole. HP software engineers were on hand to make sure the components could connect to each other and interface with Adobe’s software. Adobe Researchers focused on the software for turning data into digital materials that work in the 3D world—and ensuring that everything fits perfectly into designers’ workflows.
“The process involved a lot of testing, failing, fixing, and always making sure we were progressing in the right direction. We made many prototypes, always going back and forth and giving each other feedback,” says Derel.
Speed, lighting, and other hurdles
One of the early challenges the team faced was speed. The first prototype took up to 45 minutes to transfer a single capture’s data from the device onto the computer. To eliminate this bottleneck, researchers realized they’d need to put compute power (NVIDIA Jetson AGX) directly onto the device and then output the result.
Lighting was another complex issue. In a photo studio, you can bring in big lights and allow for plenty of distance between the camera and a material. Even in sunlight, you know the direction of a light source, which helps make sense of colors and shadows. But inside a device, the material is close to the camera and an LED panel sheds light from all directions. “It took a lot of iterations and careful calibrations to accurately capture and interpret all of the details of a material,” says Derel.
Now that the HP Z Captis is in the hands of users, the Adobe Research and HP teams are still meeting to plan what’s next. “We built a strong relationship, tested by Covid and long distance, and we’re all happy with the results and excited to continue,” says Derel. For now, he’s interested to see how new users will test the device’s limits—whether they’re creating realistic 3D models of products or designing new things we haven’t even imagined yet.
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