Yes if one wanted a specific fabric patterns then Vray scans would be the way to go. Note that the link I gave has papers from 2011-2016. I was thinking more of an artist driven approach. Thus the 2012 paper “Structure-aware Synthesis for Predictive Woven Fabric Appearance”
looked promising:
“Procedural techniques are manually intensive, and fail to capture the naturally arising irregularities which contribute significantly to the overall appearance of cloth. Techniques that acquire the detailed 3D structure of real fabric samples are constrained only to model the scanned samples and cannot represent different fabric designs. This paper presents a new approach to creating volumetric models of woven cloth, which starts with user-specified fabric designs and produces models that correctly capture the yarn-level structural details of cloth.”
but perhaps there is a more recent paper that has an even better approach...