Tropical Scanning Trip - Textures.com

3 months of preparations, 16 days of execution.
Claude Opus modifies the scanner software via Starlink in the middle of the jungle.
2k26 is wild.
https://www.textures.com/category/nature/237#tropical

The goal was simple: build a photogrammetry scanner that could scan 2+ meter tropical leaves and still fit inside an airplane bag.

I approached it by reverse-engineering small Bluetooth LED lights. I discovered the HEX codes they used in BLE protocols. Next, I needed a microcontroller that could sustain 10+ Bluetooth connections at once and wrote the software for it with AI.
This engineering journey was hard and long as I entered unfamiliar territory. But it was essential to make the scanning trip possible.

We chose Caribbean forests as our destination. Jakub Dąbrowski and I tried to scan as many plants as possible, dealing with complications along the way. The mission was successful, and we returned with thousands of photos.

Then came the processing. Most of it was done by Damian Kuik with a little help from me. We wrote a lot of scripts to speed up the entire workflow.

The result is nearly 300 tropical PBR atlases now available on textures.com - The largest jungle foliage texture library.

The next stage is a next-gen tropical 3D plant models collection, which has just come out of preproduction.