1 · SOURCING

The Base Selection

The scan is only as good as the cloth. Most fabric libraries fail before the scanner is switched on — at the point of selection.

CMF designers and material scanners are asking the same question from different angles: does this material have enough to say? A flat, characterless cloth photographs poorly and scans poorly. A cloth with structural depth — a defined weave, a readable grain, a surface that responds differently to light at different angles — gives both the designer and the scanner something to work with.

We source from specialist textile houses across London, filtered by three criteria.

Structural variety: plain weave, twill, satin, bouclé, and jacquard each produce fundamentally different normal map topologies. A tight satin float reads as directional sheen; a bouclé loop reads as displaced geometry. Colourways extend that range — a raw linen and an indigo-dyed version of the same weave behave differently in a render — but colour alone doesn't replace structural breadth.

Scan suitability: good cloth and scannable cloth are not always the same thing. The sample must lie flat without curl or memory, and the repeat pattern must fit within a 40–60 cm capture area with 25% margin for tiling. Some otherwise exceptional fabrics don't make the cut.

Design relevance: contemporary interior textiles, upholstery linens, architectural mesh, fashion bouclés — materials that 3D artists working in furniture, interiors, and product visualisation actually reach for.
Each swatch is documented with fibre composition, weave type, weight per square metre, and supplier reference. That metadata informs displacement scale, transmission behaviour, and product descriptions downstream.

2 · SAMPLE PREPARATION

Scanner-Ready

At the resolution the Colormass scanner operates — up to approximately 800 DPI, producing maps of around 13,000 × 13,000 pixels for a 40 cm sample — contamination invisible to the naked eye becomes a visible artefact in the normal map.

Each sample is steamed and pressed to eliminate fold creases and roll memory while preserving the fabric's natural hand. Lint, dust, and loose thread ends are removed under magnification with lint-free cloths. All handling uses cotton gloves to prevent skin oils from altering surface reflectance. Prepared samples ship flat, interleaved with acid-free tissue, to the Colormass facility in Germany.

3 · SCANNING

svBRDF Capture

The Colormass scanner doesn't capture one photograph — it captures thousands, each under a different lighting condition. That image set feeds a svBRDF fitting algorithm that derives the true physical reflectance of the surface rather than estimating it from a single pass. The sample sits on a motorised table while the capture system illuminates it from hundreds of angles, recording reflectance at each position. 

Simpler capture methods finish in one to two minutes using heuristic estimation. The difference shows in the render: softer detail, less accurate specularity, no anisotropy data.
The scanner handles samples up to 1.8 × 1.8 metres, so the full pattern repeat of most fabrics captures in a single pass. Scan resolution scales to the structural detail of each cloth — 580 DPI for fine plain-weave linens, 775 DPI for coarse bouclés.

4 · THE TEN MAPS

What the Scanner Outputs

Each scan produces ten PBR maps aligned with the Disney Principled BSDF model. The full set for fabric:

Base Colour. Diffuse-reflected colour stripped of lighting. Shows yarn dye, tonal variation between warp and weft, and fibre-orientation shifts.

Normal. Surface orientation as RGB tangent-space data (OpenGL Y+ up). Defines every thread crossing, every bouclé loop, every corduroy ridge — the weave structure itself.

Roughness. Surface gloss variation at the thread level. The peak of a loop reflects differently from the valley between loops; a scan captures that micro-variation where procedural estimation averages it out.

Specular. Fresnel reflectance at normal incidence. Low for cloth but varies with fibre chemistry — nylon reflects more than raw cotton.

Height. Geometric displacement data. For a bouclé with loops rising 1–2 mm, displacement adds parallax and silhouette detail beyond what normal mapping achieves.

Metallic. Nearly black for fabric. Present for edge cases: metallic thread, lurex yarn, coated mesh. Measured, not assumed.

Anisotropy Strength & Rotation. Two maps encoding directional reflectance — how stretched the specular highlight becomes and in which direction. For woven fabric, these capture thread orientation at every point. A satin weave with long float threads shows pronounced directional sheen; a balanced plain weave shows uniform reflectance. Most competing scanners do not capture anisotropy at all.

Ambient Occlusion. Soft shadow data between threads and in weave interstices.

Transmission. Light passage through the material — the property that separates a voile from a canvas. Scan-derived where the weave permits light passage, providing physically grounded translucency.

5 · POST-PROCESSING

Tiling & Cleanup

A raw scan is not yet a usable texture. The Colormass Texture Editor handles post-processing — every operation applies simultaneously across all maps in the texture set, keeping the layers in lockstep. Three tools are central to the fabric workflow.

Image / GIF: Tracer Line tool — before and after thread straightening on a fine weave

 

Tool 01

Tracer Line Tiling

Fabric threads wander by fractions of a degree from true horizontal — enough to break the seam when the texture tiles. The Tracer Line tool traces each individual thread, detects its actual path, and straightens it to align with the tile boundary. The tile repeats along the weave's own geometry rather than an imposed grid.

 

Tool 02

Gradient Removal

Scanned maps can carry low-frequency brightness shifts from the capture process that become visible as patchwork when tiled. The Gradient Removal operator flattens these. Applied with a brush mask, it allows selective correction per map — removing a gradient from the normal map without altering the diffuse, for example.

 

Tool 03

AI Blend

AI Blend uses the traced thread lines and detected weave geometry to create a structure-aware seam. Rather than a cross-fade that softens detail at the boundary, the blend continues thread structure across it. The result holds up under close-up displacement rendering where traditional blending produces visible softening.

6 · VALIDATION

Two-Pass Testing

First pass: The Colormass platform’s browser-based render environment. Tiled material on thoughtful test geometries under multiple lighting conditions, checking seam visibility, displacement plausibility, and reflectance consistency with the weave type.

Second pass: Cinema 4D with Redshift. The material applied to real-world geometry — an upholstered chair, a curtain panel, a cushion — testing scale accuracy at 1:1, displacement behaviour under subdivision, and rendering compatibility across all ten maps in a standard Metallic/Roughness node setup. Materials that fail either pass return to the Texture Editor.

7 · DELIVERY

What You Download

The full ten-map set optimised for Metallic/Roughness workflows, with documentation covering fibre composition, weave type, physical dimensions, displacement scale, and capture DPI. Showcase renders demonstrate the material at working scale on representative objects. OpenGL normal format by default; Specular/Glossiness users invert the roughness map in their renderer.

Scanning without design curation produces accurate textures of unremarkable fabrics. Curation without scanning produces attractive swatches that fall apart in the renderer. The Essential Fabric Series is the intersection: selected textiles, physically measured across ten channels, post-processed with structure-aware tools, and validated in production rendering conditions.

If you want to put the Colormass workflow to the test with your own materials, they're currently offering exclusive beta access to their scanning platform. Send your samples, run the pipeline, and see what svBRDF capture produces on fabric you already know. Visit the Colormass platform here to apply.

For further reading -  Explore Colormass