Substance Source Kicks Off New Sportswear Fabrics!

  • Fashion
  • Workflow

At last a non-prohibited Substance for athletes! The sportswear tech fabrics extend our selection with 30 new materials. These textiles were originally scanned, then processed with Substance Designer‘s embedded scan processing templates.

Using fabrics made by leading sports textile manufacturer TexRay, our team has scanned each material with a focus on detail and accuracy. In each of these 30 materials, fiber, weave, pattern, glossiness, and other attributes all come together to reproduce the aspect and feeling of top-of-the-line technical wear for athletes – both professionals and hobbyists.

Hybrid Scans: Taking 3D Scans to the Next Level

Thanks to the power of Substance, 3D scans are not limited to properties of the original fabrics: fashion designers maintain absolute control, allowing them to create their new collection in different colors, or with different levels of glossiness, in order to swiftly iterate on the look of the fabric. For instance, what if you need to turn the fabric you picked for your sweatshirt into a more metallic color? No problem, it’s only a matter of tweaking one parameter.

And with 30 fabrics, each possessing two or three presets, it’s time to let your imagination run wild. All of the 30 fabrics embed presets for a total of more than 90 variations that you can browse directly on Substance Source. Access to Substance Source is available through the Substance plan.

How We Scan and Process the Materials

First, we take very high-quality pictures of the fabric we want to reproduce. This is done with a material scan device that captures maps (here, we used a Vizoo scanner). This step gets us non-tileable color, normal and opacity maps. We will then process these maps into Substance Designer‘s dedicated scan processing template.

Once dragged into the graph, the maps will go through a set of nodes allowing you to first select and crop the part of the image you wish to use and then tile the maps all together in order to create a seamless material.

Sometimes the scan maps contain flaws, such as wrinkles, dark spots, or marks that can’t be erased on the physical sample. To get a clean texture we erase the unwanted imperfections with the Material Clone Patch function.

Once this is done, we can then create masks – for instance, to isolate the different colors of the weave.

The benefit of post-processing scans into Substance Designer? To get the best of both worlds. The flexibility to tweak attributes of the material using procedural techniques as well as the accuracy of the scanned data.

In less than half an hour, you have a 4K fully tweakable material! A couple more minutes to expose parameters and you end up with a ready-to-use sportswear collection generator. Artists and designers alike can then define in seconds color collections for each type of fabric by tweaking the color, roughness, or metallic of the threads. To explore the possibilities of each material, open it in Substance Player and tweak away to your heart’s content.

Watch artist Wes McDermott’s walkthrough of the scan process workflow with Substance Designer at 11 am PST.

Allegorithmic & TexRay

The creation of these materials marks the second time Allegorithmic and Taiwanese fabric manufacturer TexRay have worked together, following our first collaboration in summer 2017. For this second collaboration, TexRay shared with us fabric samples of their most technical fabrics, developed for their clients (activewear creators, retailers, and fashion brands)

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