Christmas came early this year in the shape of a small truckload of high-end furnishing fabric samples and swatches, ranging from 2mx2m to 20cmx20cm. So of course, I’ve been busy scanning away and will be doing so for some time to come. I’ve been using Dabarti Capture to generate hyper-detailed normal maps (no displacement map yet for time reason but I may go back and generate them later using the tiled normal maps).

Scanning is only part of the process, though. Creating tileable maps and realistic shaders from these maps takes time too and can often be hard to get right. For the last finish, scattering some fibers helps a lot to boost the realism and achieve this fuzzy fabric look. It also goes a long way to re-creating the grazing-angle color fade observed in many softer fabrics. As you can see, I’ve been experimenting here with trying to get the right amount of fuzz and the right scale (the image above probably has a little too much). For this, I’ve used my favorite plugin, Itoo Forest Pack Pro, to scatter splines on the entire chair. The splines themselves have a 2sided material in order to pick up some glow from the back light.

Above and below are just a few examples of the resulting material, rendered in V-Ray Next GPU. The chair, by the way, is Swoon, by Space Copenhagen for Fredericia. The side table is Pon, by Jasper Morrison, also for Fredericia. The models are displayed in a slightly modified version of my Classical scene, which you can get here (for V-Ray and FStorm).