Hey! so I was fortunate enough to be contacted and asked to produce a short series of tutorials for texturing XYZs' new launch of the micro fabric maps. To be fair it's probably because only two weeks ago I published my university research project in which I discussed a very similar technique for cloth map creation, Lucky timing I know. I'd heavily recommend checking out their maps though, they are incredibly well made and will definetly speed up your cloth shading workflow :) Anyways, welcome to the tutorial! We will be using the Autodesk Maya & Foundrys Nuke. I'll also be using Vray in this tutorial however I specifically avoided using any Vray specific nodes in the shader so you can follow along with any renderer. So, why is it good to create fabric shaders using a semi procedural workflow?Keeping our fabric shaders semi-procedural gives you an incredible amount of freedom for testing new ideas with your cloth and gives you the best balance between speed and quality in my opinion. Having the base fabric shader semi-procedural doesn't restrict the use of any hand painted maps either, you can easily load a texture containing specific wear patterns for the cloth and layer that on top of the base fabric (which as you can imagine, speeds your work up a fair bit ! Theres literally no downsides In the first video we will discuss what each of the maps are for and how I recommend using them. We will then go through making a basic shader in Maya to use all of the maps to make a semi-procedural shader.
The second video will cover how we can merge the three maps that come with each pack into one map, allowing us to increase our speed of iteration even further.
Finally in the third video we will go though integrating the new multi-map into our shader, ending with a few cloth shading tips.
