Blender Procedural Fabric Weaver

This product is a library of shader nodes and materials that will quickly generate realistic fabric materials for your project.

Works for both Cycles and Eevee

The library includes:

• Weave Engine node: With different settings, you can create a large variety of fabric textures.
• Fabric Shader node: Utilize the textures generated by the Weave Engine to create realistic fabric materials.
• 12 configurable fabric materials, created using the Weave Engine combined with some additional techniques.

Requirement:

This library requires Blender 4.1 or newer

Installation:

After unpacking the downloaded ZIP file, there are 2 ways you can use this library:

Method 1:

1. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> File Paths
2. In the Asset Libraries section, click the + icon to the right
3. Navigate to the folder containing the Main.blend file
4. Click Add Asset Library

After these steps, you will have a new asset library in your asset browser, you can then directly use the materials in the Fabric Material catalog or build your own materials using the Weave Engine and the Fabric Shader in the Core catalog .

Method 2:

Simply link or append the materials or node groups from the Main.blend file to your project.

How to use the Weave Engine node:

The Weave Engine node has several input slots:

• UVMap: The Weave engine requires a UV map so you have to connect a UV map into the UVMap input slot.
• Size: Control the size of the fabric texture.
• Color 1 / Color 2: Set the color for the Weft/Warp threads.
• Height scale: Make the thread bump higher or lower.
• Gab: Set the gab in between the threads, setting a big gab will make the fabric into a mesh.
• Use back side: Set to 1 to let the Weave Engine generate the back of the fabric, set to 0 to have the front and the back exactly the same.
• Up/Down: The Weft threads will alternate above and below a number of Warp threads based on these 2 parameters.
• Shift: The up/down pattern of the Weft threads will shift for each row, this parameter set the distance of the shift.

The Weave Engine produces several textures that you can use to further enhance your fabric:

• Color: The color of the fabric
• Mask: A black and white mask to separate the Weft/Warp threads
• Thread IDs: The ID of the threads, the Warp threads carry Integer IDs, the Weft threads carry integer IDs + 0.5 so that they don't have the same IDs as the Warp threads. You can use this ID to generate random variations for each threads.
• Thread UV: The UV of the threads, this allows you to generate textures within the individual threads.
• Alpha: Depending on how you set the the gabs in between the threads, this alpha may produce see-through holes within the fabric.
• Normal: The normal map of the fabric, connect this to the normal input of a shader to achieve the bump effect.
• Height: The height information of the threads, if you want to make real displacement for the fabric, you can use this texture as the displacement map.

By settings the Up/Down/Shift parameters, you will be able to achieve a lot of different weaving styles, below are a few examples: