I am in procress to rebuild two fabric materials but instead of using fake bump mapping I would like to rather use particles and hair to generate the 3dimensional fiber structure I need as you can see in the image below. One material has bigger blobs/clusters of firbers like the dog toy and the chair has all over the surface here and there some thin fur clusters.
I watched Andrew’s towel tutorial again which gets close to the structure the dog toy has with using hair that has a great thickness. But in close ups the particle system is not sufficient.
I tried to rebuild the chair material with a particle system myself but in close ups sometimes I can look good but from a distance it also breaks to be convincing because the particle system looks wrong casts hard shadows.
I think the overall reason why those two try outs failed is in each case one single hair particle is used to visualize a cluster of fibers in real life. I did some research and found out that the hair now has a cluster option.
But I have a really hard time to make clusers that are short in length and rather look like on the two fabric materials I posted above. My first child cluster test looked like this interesting but not really fitting - rather looks like some plants lol :
So here is my question: does anybody have experience doing fabric work with particles this way? Is the system even capabale to visualize such 3dimension structures? Or will in the end render time be so bad that the computer will suffer from a melt down or ram explosion?
I think I started to get an idea about how the children clumping settings work. I start to fear thar with the amount of particles maybe needed you might explode the RAM usage.
It’s a a tricky effect, had some luck separating the hair on a separate render layer and blurring it. This has the added benefit of needing much lower samples on the hair. Still not quite there though. You are using the intercept/colorramp for transparency at the tip right?
Kind of effed up. I guess I kept messing with that blend, partially destroying it. I put it back together best I could, I simplified the render layers, floor and fabric, instead of completely separating the hairs. There are two color mices in the compositing, the first one mixes super blur (Super fluffy) with mild blur, and the mix on the right mixes the original hairs back in.
On the original file, Jacking the first mix node pushes it toward santa hat fluff. The mix node on the far right mixes back in the unblurred hair, you need 10-40% of that to look right.
(Same with second file)
I thought the fabric fuzz reminded me a little of a volumetric Musgrave texture, so I played with it a while, then came back to the thread only to find that Photox has an amazing texture. Great job!
I’ll post anyway just for comparison because this renders really fast on GPU without much set up. Just duplicate the object that has a fabric surface, add a solidify modifier (to give a little volume for the fuzz just above the original surface). Then add a volume material as shown.
Very cool see360. Bonus points on procedural, and fast.
Another drawback to my hair compositing is that it relies almost exclusively on Gaussian blur, so if you are rendering video and the camera pushes in on the fabric you will have to get cute and do some keyframing on the blur parameters, as at that point you are dealing with pixels. Basically the parameters I have for those renders are tweaked to match the render resolution in the blend, if you render at a much higher size, you will see very little fuzz.
I experimented a little more with the volumetric approach with real couch objects, and the illusion is really lost along nooks and crannies (such as between couch cushions) where there should be very little light. It’s not as simple as “add a solidify modifier” and click render. There should be a volumetric “diffuse” shader to make it work.
Played around with the chair, never quite matched it. If anyone is interested in it it’s saved as fuzzychair32. Same basic idea, but with more procedural bump. The fabric nodes have a little special sauce that give a bolder rim effect, although there is a strong rim/kick anyways.
Keep in mind that that the blur nodes in the compositing are tweaked to match the render resolution. So if you increase your render resolution (the size of the image) you will need to increase the blur paramaters.
The fabric is all procedural, there are no images used, but I did do something I don’t usually do and that is use UV for everything, disp mods, bump… so If you try and and append the material you need to have your mesh unwrapped (or change the texture coordinates to generated or object) which would work too.
If I could improve one thing it would be the large pilling (“lump”) objects. I would make them higher poly with more variation among the group.
It’s almost subliminal but there are 3 head hairs on the surface. Although barely seen it helps sell it.
Thanks cekuhnen. Experiment with the pillings and you might just cross the valley. The fabric material (named cloth) has the most complex nodes. IMO each node serves a clear purpose and if anything, they should be made more complex with more randomness. Here are the nodes explained:
