Are there any Iray canvas shaders?

john_antkowiak

Hi, everyone. I'm looking at fabric shaders, seeing tons of lace, satins, denims, jerseys, knits, leathers, and sci-fi choices. I don't see any everyday practical fabrics like Cordura nylon, canvas, twill, cotton duck, or nylon webbing. Am I looking in the wrong place, or has no one recognized a market for these essential fabrics for military/outdoor/superhero/fantasy or just ordinary guy stuff?

Thanks  :)

nonesuch00

No, I have the Mec4D vol 2 shaders but none include those specific types of fabric weaves as iRay presets that I remember. I'd check but I have a render running now. They shouldn't be hard to calculate procedurally mathematically I don't think but to actually find the specifications of the thread weaves is what would be needed.

I wonder if someone has done that already? Maybe in will.timmins WTP3 procedural shaders he might have at least the beginnings of such cloth weaves defined but he said he's not working on his WTP3 shaders anymore.

The not so nice part of procedural shaders is you actually have to render to see the results which means to avoid wasting tremendous amounts of time on trail and error to get the procedural shaders correct you'd rather research the mathematics of the pattern and derive it via induction if you must otherswise long times of wasted effort.

OK, I navigated to the Mec4D shader presets in the file system and she has as presets various types of leather, satin, cotton, burlap, tarpauline, jeans (denim is a canvas twill I believe), burlap, and camo (you'll note the military & the defense contractors are so busy continually obsoleting camo and military clothing specififications to neccessitate forced re-purchasing of uniforms and drive profit centers it's likely her camo is only relavant for a few places. USA has at least 3 different weaves used in uniforms that I know of and that's not even counting all the different types of underwear and PT clothing).

Then Mec4D has a long list of procedural fabrics (70 different procedural weaves) but neglected to name them anything other than numbers. Maybe @Mec4D will chime in what the official and common names (when there is one) are for those procedural fabrics if she based them off of real weave patterns. Asa far as what you & I would need to make informed descisions on how to use those procedurals, each preset we would need to know the 'common historical name the weave is or was derived from' and the the common professional trade name and identification used (Maybe they only use numbers like Mec4D has done?), then the actal thread types and what the threads are made of physically, possible color ranges, and whether colors or different types of thread are interwoven, if threads used are created from different types of twined physical material (again bringing up color sepecifications), and lastly a short list of the type of clothing, furniture, bed clothing, tents, and so on, such weaves are most commonly used for. It needn't be an exhaustive list of course but one is not likely to have underwear made of denim canvas twill so you wouldn't find eg, women's panties as one of the common uses for a fabric weave of material X. So not impossible but a job you'd need to research and write things down in an organized way before your proceeded.

Fisty

We have corduroy, denim, linen, a basic rough, plain knits, etc in Fabirc Basics for Iray..  click on the banner under this post and see if it'll work for you.

john_antkowiak

Thank you both. The Mec4D Vol. 2 fabrics appear to be comprised of only a small number of weaves with a bunch of different colors; most of the weaves are way off target. I've already ruled them out. Most of the camo shaders I've found are more interested in the color pattern than the fabric pattern; what I'd like to find is normal maps, bump maps, etc that can be applied to ay color scheme. Fisty, you are so on the right track but the denim maps are as close as it gets; I can't find one that really fits the bill. For example, nothing approximates the ripstop summer weight pattern of Army BDUs, or cotton or nylon webbing, or the Cordura nylon that duffle bags and web gear and countless other items are made from.

On the other hand, the term "procedural" isn't one I understand in this context. Maybe the problem is that I don't know how to make the most of them?

nonesuch00

john_antkowiak said:

Thank you both. The Mec4D Vol. 2 fabrics appear to be comprised of only a small number of weaves with a bunch of different colors; most of the weaves are way off target. I've already ruled them out. Most of the camo shaders I've found are more interested in the color pattern than the fabric pattern; what I'd like to find is normal maps, bump maps, etc that can be applied to ay color scheme. Fisty, you are so on the right track but the denim maps are as close as it gets; I can't find one that really fits the bill. For example, nothing approximates the ripstop summer weight pattern of Army BDUs, or cotton or nylon webbing, or the Cordura nylon that duffle bags and web gear and countless other items are made from.

On the other hand, the term "procedural" isn't one I understand in this context. Maybe the problem is that I don't know how to make the most of them?

After I thought a bit about your question I became curious about the mathematics of textiles and so I did a search engine lookup and there are PDFs out there that talk about such things, including color. However, I don't know your education background or interest in such mathematics or doing a lot of work to create functions that make PBR compatible generated images from them on the fly.

e.g. the now well known textile , at least in America, .300 thread count bed linen weave is 300 threads of mercurized cotton per square inch. 

http://www.linenplace.com/product_guide/truth_about_thread_count.html

So you'd need to represent that simple weave to mathematically in 3D and then convert it to create the normal maps and all these other PBR maps.  In this case since the weave is symmetric orientation doesn't matter but many weaves aren't symmetric so orientation would matter. That's what procedural means.

I'm just to giving you an ideal what to search for as some of those things might of been modeled in other programs than DAZ and the same approach can be used for DAZ. 

As Fisty pointed you to some traditionally made textures from his banner and I'll point out Wilmap's site (look in the Freebies in the DAZ Forum for wilmap's thread) has many fabric texures although none that I remember were the rip-stop (summer) and poplin (winter) fabric used in security BDU fabrics. You'll probably get on OK representation by searching for that fabric by name and then using one of those online normal & bump map generator sites. However, I wouldn't use the actual camoflage pattern and tile it as you'll wind up with a Moire pattern most likely. Just use the generated normals to make the rip-stop pattern. I doubt you'll actually find that many accurate texture sets on many types of fabrics online though, the resolution and compute power hasn't been there til recently.

Also, I did a search and there is a long list of global military camo style fabrics here (although I didn't look through them all to whittle it done to USA ripstop):

https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1242734

I know nothing about facepunch except those BDU fabrics they gathered are posted there. Seems to be a forum where gamers and game developers chat and affiliated with that game studio Facepunch Studios.

Fisty

nonesuch00 said:

As Fisty pointed you to some traditionally made textures from her banner

There.. fixed that for ya..

john_antkowiak

"However, I don't know your education background or interest in such mathematics or doing a lot of work to create functions that make PBR compatible generated images from them on the fly."

Wow... I'm so not ready to do that. I'm a bit past barely competent with an actual needle and thread - but mathmatical computation on the fly? Totally out of my depth. But this one's new on me too: "one of those online normal & bump map generator sites." What is that? Sounds like I should check it out. I'm not worried about the graphical camo pattern right now, as what I'm really trying to do is a solid-color BDU.

 

Thanks again  :)

nonesuch00

john_antkowiak said:

"However, I don't know your education background or interest in such mathematics or doing a lot of work to create functions that make PBR compatible generated images from them on the fly."
Wow... I'm so not ready to do that. I'm a bit past barely competent with an actual needle and thread - but mathmatical computation on the fly? Totally out of my depth. But this one's new on me too: "one of those online normal & bump map generator sites." What is that? Sounds like i should check it out. I'm not worried about the graphical camo pattern right now, as what I'm really trying to do is a solid-color BDU.

Thanks again  :)

 

 

Online Normal Generator:

http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/

and procedural fabrics in Blender I'll post anyway since others reading this thread might be curious:

http://planetblender.com/makingproceduralfabricmaterials/

and for my own interest too since you made me curious about the subject.

Fisty said:

nonesuch00 said:

As Fisty pointed you to some traditionally made textures from her banner

There.. fixed that for ya..

Thanks. Avatars are just avatars to me and I've found many males have female avatars so no disrepect intended.