Fine fabric photography.
Having the highest quality textures is a fundamental part of creating photorealism. Often our clients send us high quality images or we can use textures from our existing image bank for high grade surfaces, but of course this isn't always the case.
One of our clients provided fabric samples for a furnishing project which needed to be reproduced in CG. To capture the micro details and shadows that traditional photo techniques lack we've been experimenting with a photometric stereo 8 point lighting technique.
The method.
The method uses the same photography rig and technique used to capture flat textures, the only difference being the sample is photographed 8 (or more) times with a different lighting point for each shot.
The shots are then combined and processed with either Dabarti or Substance to create a tileable texture.
Results.
We found that photometric stereo offers realistic results without the limitations that the scanning techniques we've tried previously have. Capturing and processing the images does take longer than flat texture methods, but for CG where the detail quality is paramount the trade off is tolerable.
