Preview from latest post:
I’ve been doing more character clothing design of late and this seems a good moment to build a library of procedural fabrics.
To kickstart the thread, a happy accident:
Still needs work, so I’m going to put this veil material one in the backburner until I have dealt with more basic weaves, but I did some procedural floral patterns that will probably work very well here.
No pretty render previews today, but I made progress on the base weave pattern. Twice already I had to scrap everything and restart from zero upon realizing the method I used to generate the threads had alignment issues with the displacement map or something.
A couple of flat color previews:
So far I’ve spent 20% of the time getting a feature right, 20% accidentally creating nice patterns or a feature I didn’t intend to develop yet, and 40% breaking stuff that already worked. 
Good work ! Procedural are fun too work with, I will follow your work 
Good work ! Procedural are fun too work with, I will follow your work
Thanks! It’s all fun and games until you get too ambitious. One glance at the ensuing node chaos is enough to make me weep!
No nice renders to share yet. The displacement/normal maps are still incomplete and without them there’s no point in applying the fabrics to a scene. Better stick to flat color top views.
I’ve been reconfiguring the nodes and yesterday made a UX breakthrough when I discovered how to add special node socket types. I’ve been dreaming of integer sockets for ages!
…but unfortunately the settings don’t stop growing. I knew they’d be big, that’s why I split Warp and Weft into two settings nodes (+bonus points for symmetrizing patterns more easily), yet… That’s way too much! I’ll see if I can consolidate a bunch of settings later without loosing flexibility. And I still have to find a good approach for configuring twill patterns. *sigh*
Anyway, I got a couple of proof-of-concept tests to show!
These are thread shaping details I don’t see in 3D fabrics very often. Do you know why detailed fabrics tend to look so stiff in renders even with good cloth simulation? It’s because the threads have no deformation, no volume variation at all. It’s like making a fabric out of wires—no matter how well you deform the overall structure it’ll still look terribly uncomfortable and unnatural. It’s one of these things your brain picks up even if you don’t consciously understand the reason behind the off sensation. 
