Substance Source Sportswear: Winter 2019

  • Design

This season is all about performance: a collection of 20 brand new technical fabrics appears on Substance Source today! These materials, scanned from real samples provided by our long-time partner Tex-Ray, is our most recent exploration into the world of sports fabrics.

This time, we wanted to do something a bit different, so we gave Ronan Mahon early access to the selection. We’d noticed his work on the X-TAON contest and wanted to see what he’d create with these new materials. He didn’t disappoint:

In this collection, you can get your hands on two kinds of materials. The first is composed of scans, to which we’ve added modifiable parameters. These hybrid scans push the borders of capture: though based on real-world data, you retain the ability to synthetically modify several aspects of the material, such as color, scale, and more.

Because we like to go above and beyond, we’ve also added entirely procedural fabric armors. These materials reproduce plain twill weaving and simple knit structures. And procedural means absolute freedom, since every single brick that comprises the material is modifiable.

Hybrid materials enhance fashion design:

Beyond conventional scanned materials, hybrids unite the best of both worlds: accuracy from real material capture, and the creative freedom to customize this data.

The sample size, its color, and glossiness no longer impose any limitations on your 3D material! Thanks to color masking and procedural techniques, fashion designers can easily change the key attributes of the fabrics.

Create entire palettes of fabrics. Explore as many variations as you need for shoes, garments, upholstery – or anything, really. Simplify decision making with quick photorealistic 3D designs for review.

In an industry where speed is paramount, digital materials add a significant boost to the pace of the design process.

Smart digitalization enabler:

Don’t wait for the prototypes to see your designs!

Specifying materials can now become instantaneous for designers; suppliers don’t need to capture thousands of references within their catalogs. Save money on physical swatchbook production and shipment; textile suppliers can now focus on providing designers with parametric digital materials catalog and focus only on designer-specified variations.

Digitizing your sample catalogs gets simpler, faster and more cost-effective with hybridization.

Just capturing a single sample allows you to recreate an entire range of references in digital format, as color, glossiness and yarn properties become tweakable parameters.

Material design in digital:

A fully procedural material, on the other hand, gives you immense freedom. And our team wants nothing more than to grant artists greater flexibility, so we created new procedural assets. You can even control the weave of the textile itself.

Node after node, we weave the most common types of textiles. This means that you can choose the size of the threads all the way up to the number of fuzzy fibers rising loose from the surface of the fabric. This allows you to simulate the textile lifecycle.

Knits and double knits are also at your disposal. Control the colors and properties of both the weft and warp yarns to craft multicolor jerseys.

Endless variations, tailored designs – this is just a starting point!

The .sbs graphs for the procedural materials are available on Substance Source. Play, tweak, learn. Take material creation to the next level by adding procedural effects like prints and embroidery – you name it!

These are just the first steps on the path of digital materials transforming the fashion industry. More and more, designers will be able to express their boundless creativity in a more sustainable way.

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