Cloth/Fabric materials are imho most problematic of all, and often are the weakest point in many renders.
The regular ggx/blinn/whatever brdf is not really suitable, it always comes down to some fallof cheat or weird-ass anisotropy to sort-of make it look correct’ish, but comparing to actual scanned materials the result is not at all realistic
I saw this BTF + BRDF approach mentioned on Vray forums and thought to mention it here as well, as Corona seems open to ideas.
Here’s an oldish paper http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/pubs/2006/IM06.pdf
and there is also a cloth shader plugin for vray/maya called https://github.com/vidarn/ThunderLoom
Anyway, I’m not a tech guy and have no idea if there’s anything of worth in the links, but damn, I wish for a nice cloth material all the time. I know you guys make things happen
Is there any interest in this direction at all? I think a cloth shader would be amazing help for interiors which seem to be bread and butter for most Corona users.
Andrew Price touches on why fabric materials often don’t look right. I believe if you know how to use Substance, you can create your own fabric materials that touch on issues in the paper you provided. I don’t feel it’s necessary to create a dedicated shader/material for fabrics. You just have to understand how to create the desired textures.
Interesting, looks like the substance approach might work, even though it’s not an easy one.
I think that the most important piece here is a high resolution normal map that accurately replicates the woven structure combined with appropriate reflectivity and glossiness.
On the other hand it looks like a hours and hours of work for each new fabric sample client throws at you and purchasing yet another piece of software. It would still be very much a ‘specialist’ approach instead of something easy to use for the average artist.
That’s very true, not so much for the average artist. After I saw this video, I realized how complex fabric shading really is. But a skill set such as Substance is a good example of what sets artists apart. I’m curious what the dev team has to say about a feature like this.
Substance is easy to learn and with a personal license costing $20 a month (using the ‘rent to own’ system), and combined with the fact that a few weeks ago Substance Source got 150 new fabrics that you can download (subscribers can download 30 materials per month for free), makes it totally worth the investment.
