Teddy Bergsman is an unusually prolific collector. Not in the traditional sense of the word – he doesn’t have shelves crammed with LEGO models or books of stamps tucked under coffee tables. Instead, Bergsman and his colleagues are obsessed with hunting down different landscapes, scanning each cliff face, pebble and blade of grass they find and putting results into a vast online library of the natural world.
It is their job, quite literally, to leave no stone unturned. So far Bergsman and his team at Quixel – the environment-scanning startup he founded in 2011 – have built up a database, which Bergsman says is the largest of its kind, containing hundreds of thousands of scans. By the end of 2019, Bergsman says, there will be more than a million.
So far, Bergsman’s scanning odyssey has taken him to Iceland’s glaciers and lava fields, the jungles of Southeast Asia and seen him end up facing the wrong end of a rifle in Pakistan when the military interrupted one of Quixel’s pre-dawn scanning sessions. His goal? “To create a library that [contains] everything that already exists in this world.”
You’ve probably brushed past one of Quixel’s rocks, leaves or tabletops in one digital world or another. The company’s database has been used in the creation of just about any major game franchise you care to name. Its scans pop up in Red Dead Redemption 2, Battlefield V and theCall of Duty games. The 2016 live-action The Jungle Book used Quixel scans to help build the film’s photorealistic rainforest environments. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Since game and film studios are free to put their own creative spin on the scans in Quixel’s Megascans library, it’s tricky pinpointing when and where exactly one of the company’s scans has been used. But Bergsman says his staff know the library so closely they can recognise a Quixel asset when they stumble upon it in gameplay, and have spotted numerous examples of rocks and trees plucked from the Quixel library in RDR2.
For anyone outside the company, however, Quixel scans blend inconspicuously with the background of whatever game they’re planing. This is exactly the point, Bergsman explains. “Creating photorealistic nature is one of the most difficult tasks you can have as an environment artist,” he says. Difficult and boring. “[Artists] don't want to sculpt the hundredth rock or the thousandth stick.”
Instead, he hopes that the Quixel library frees up artists so they can spend their work time being more imaginative. “You want to create incredible space ships or aliens or things that don't really exist in real life,” he says. “That's essentially why this exists.”
Around half of Quixel’s 100 employees are full-time scanners, based in one of 12 hubs away from the firm’s headquarters in Uppsala, Sweden. When they’re running at full capacity, the teams racks up one million gigabytes (one petabyte) of new image data every month. Quixel’s scanners aren’t just capturing the size and shape of the objects being scanned, but the way they refract light and the precise texture of their surfaces. All of this adds up to three billion datapoints in a single raw scan, which can weigh in at hundreds of gigabytes before being compressed so that it can be downloaded by the end users.
Bergsman is tight-lipped about how the scanners are made, although he does say they use light scanning technology to build up a 3D image of the object. The first scanner the firm built was a two-meters squared cuboid, requiring a team of six people to lug around and operating. “It truly looked like some kind of nuclear device,” he says. Now the teams mostly work with handheld scanners when it comes to smaller objects or surfaces, or they use drones when they’re capturing an item larger than a bus.
Sometimes, it’s easier to scan the constituent parts of a building rather than try to get the whole thing in one go. “If we see a temple, we will try to firstly understand how the temple is built,” Bergsman says. Then they could allow people to use those different modules to build their own version of the temple.
The same thinking could be used to recreate a skyscraper, Bergsman says. But when you come to modern buildings you start running into another problem: copyright. His team started scanning the natural world partly because you don’t need permits and copyright clearance. Fabric patterns, manhole covers and sewer grates might all be subject to copyright, something the Quixel team check with their lawyers before anything gets added to the library. “This is something we learned the hard way,” he says.
If Bergsman is going to complete his goal of scanning everything in the known world, he’ll have plenty more copyright hurdles to overcome. But he doesn’t seem deterred. “This is something that I know will require the better part of my life to accomplish,” he says. “But it’s my true passion and what I live for and i don't think I will ever stray away from that ambition.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
