50 Tileable Fabric Pattern — VOL 03

The third fabric volume splits its fifty patterns into two groups on purpose. Forty of them are worked weaves — the structures with a visible thread pattern, the ones that carry a garment on their own. The other ten are basic fabrics: quiet, near-flat surfaces with just enough texture to stop a material reading as plastic. Most scenes need far more of the second kind than artists expect, and this is the volume that supplies both.

The breakdown

• 40 fabric pattern Normal maps, 16-bit PNG
• 40 fabric pattern displacement maps, 16-bit PNG
• 40 fabric pattern ambient occlusion maps, 8-bit PNG
• 10 basic fabric Normal maps, 16-bit PNG
• 10 basic fabric displacement maps, 16-bit PNG
• 10 basic fabric ambient occlusion maps, 8-bit PNG
• Two sets published free as samples

All fifty tile seamlessly, and each set was authored so its three maps agree with one another rather than being generated independently — which is the failure that shows up as a normal map lighting a bump the height data does not have.

The way to use the two groups is together. Put a basic fabric down as the base surface of a garment, then mask a worked pattern into the panels that need to read as construction: a cuff, a yoke, a bodice front, a cushion face. The result is a material with a hierarchy of detail, which is what real cloth has, instead of one busy weave applied at uniform strength across every square centimetre.

The maps are supplied as loose images rather than as a packaged material, so a 3ds Max, Maya, ZBrush, Mari or Substance pipeline all treat them the same way. The garment in the presentation renders came from an Evgenia Petrova model and is not part of this download.