Anyone got any good techniques for creating a nice, fluffy towel? I can just about model a towel, but never been happy with my rendered results. Forever being asked to add ‘fluffy’ towels. Noise as a displacement? Vray fur? Max Hair/Fur?
Any tips you’d like to share with the forum?
yeah, very pixelly noise as a displace -even a filter > Noise > monochromatic in photoshop. It’s all about breaking the silhouette of the shading and adding in all of the small up and down bits. It’s like a rough object, just at a scale of roughness where the details (bumps / threads) are visible so you’ve gotta actually displace your geometry. Another cloth thing is to use a falloff so you have a lighter version of your diffuse colour or diffuse texture at the edges to try and simulate the bit of back scattering you get at the edges of cloth.
Falloff is a good idea. I’m trying with this texture I’ve just created (this is just a 1200px version of the 3k pixel I am using). You reckon this is a good starting point?
Yep! It’ll appear as small random dimples, should be totally fine.
Some ideas here may be of help:
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg\_education/towels\_carpet\_grass/towels\_carpet\_grass.htm
- Neil
having a good base model is very important - you cant displace the thickness. if it doesn’t look close with no displacement it probably wont look right with it either.
Yeah - my skill is mainly with architectural (i.e. ‘square’!) modelling. Anything organic and my mind gets confused! So far, for a towel, I have simply drawn a 3-vertex spline and then extruded it with 40 or 50 segments in the extrusion. Then I have used a cloth modifier to ‘drape’ it over a bath. Once I am *happy* (I never am) with the drape, I collapse, shell and turbosmooth the result.
Its ‘OK’ but I think I have a lot to learn.
towel.zip (1.6 MB)
Awesome stuff Neil
I just recently did a visual for the new bullet train in Japan - an interior showing the seating of the cars. It is not a towel but it had to look soft and cozy (like the original seating) and I used Vray Fur for this. Maybe the technique is some help for you.
So the seat was of course modeled, then I put a velvet material on it and on top of that the fur. I used this texture for the seat itself but also to direct vray fur to create the fur mostly on these ridges.
So we have a slightly visible pattern of the fur, like it would be really woven or produced.
For the fur I used the Vray Hair Material, which needs at least one GI pass to look really nice and shiny.
Here is a crop of the result:
Shadows might be a little harsh, so we brightened the whole seat in Photoshop to make it look even more soft.
of couse the fur is very short in this case, but I am sure it would look beautiful in a longer version as a towe! 
The Vray Fur render times are not too bad if you decrease the sides and knots. Maybe not so great for really detailed towel-shots
If you need any further info about the settings, material and stuff, I can take some screens of them.
Cheers
Manuel
Looks cool, would be interested in some more info on this
I am kind of in a hurry, so just quickly a screenshot of the fur setup.
I am attaching the materials I used.
The only map I used is the one I posted, I think. That is also linked with the fur. What is of course important is a nice velvet look and for that you will need a nice falloff map alongside the material settings.
let me know what you think!
