I’m working on my own project to make a room that has carpet for the floor. I have Blender 4.3.2.
I would like to make carpet similar to the picture above and I would also like to know if I should use particles or if it can be made using procedural textures. Are there any tutorials on how to make carpet with particles or something similar?
I want to make a carpet more like in the picture above. Something that looks comfortable for the feet and no rigid like hard floors.
Thanks
It would be helpful if you found a reference image at larger than 300 pixels, for a start.
Have you tried any techniques yet? I would start by going to somewhere like AmbientCG and see if you can get by with a preexisting texture first. Start simple and take a few test renders, if it looks bad or visibly “CG” then you know that won’t cut it, then you move to more complex solutions.
It all comes down to your end goal. If you just want something that looks good from like 2m distance or so then a simple scanned texture might work fine. A bit closer and you might need to add some displacement or some fuzz shading effects, if you want to get some real close macro shots then you might need to use particles and do some really fine modeling to make it look convincing.
Again, it all depends.
Thanks for the reply I’ll definitely try using the textures from AmbientCG and see how that turns out. Also, sorry for the small reference images.
My preferred approach when I want a nice fluffy carpet is a multilayered approach.
By having several slices, and using a heightmap to cut away from each layer with an alpha map, you can get a pretty decent effect from a distance, and relatively close, but the effect breaks down if you get too close:
The sliced approach does make a fairly complex shader (if the ray hits between the fibers, it can hit like a dozen transparent layers before it hits anything opaque) and it can be somewhat slow when rendering, if the carpet takes up a large amount of the screen.
But compared to instancing carpet fibers, it’s much more performant. given a fiber density of 64 threads per square inch, that’s almost 10,000 fibers per square foot, even with the most minimal topology to define a fiber, you’re looking at 50,000 polygons per square foot of carpet, so a medium sized room could easily blow past 10million polygons for carpet, and it probably still wont look that good.
The sliced shader took a little while to develop, but I don’t mind sharing it here:
carpet slices.blend (1.5 MB) CC0 license
I took a look at the file and it looks awesome. This is definitely something I can learn a lot more with 
My guy this is insane. The sheer number of clever things you pulled in this one node setup is incredible, and the layers-to-fake-3D is absolute genius. Thank you so much for putting this out there!
