Satin Material By Neil Blevins Created On: July 15th 2004
Updated On: Dec 13th 2024
Software: Blender or 3dsmax (vray)
Here's a tutorial on how to create a basic satin material.
The original material was made using my favorite renderer back in the
early 2000s, the Brazil Renderer. Someone came on the Splutterfish
Forum, and wanted to know how to make a
satin material. I was waiting at home for a plumber, and didn't have
much to do, so I decided to give it a try. Now I've updated this
tutorial showing how to make a similar material in both Blender and
3dsmax with vray.
Reference
Here's the photo of satin that I was given by the person who posted on
the forum.
Software Agnostic Material
The basic ingredients are as follows:
Shading: Regular Diffuse and Spec
Color: Pinkish or whatever color you want the satin to be
Spec: medium gloss with anisotropy that is perpendicular to the
threads of the fabric
Bump: a high frequency noise
Ways to make it more realistic:
Replace the bump procedural noise with a triplanar with a
more complex bitmap to simulate the fuzz
Here's the geometry I'll be using for the material tests. I started by
making some cloth looking geometry using a free
version of simcloth inside of 3dsmax. I took a plane, put a noise
modifier on it,
then dropped a second plane on top of the first plane. My second plane
(the cloth) all bunched up like cloth would when it impacted the first
plane. I then deleted the first plane and now had some wrinkly cloth
geometry.
Blender Example
Here's the shader for Blender...
So I started with a Principaled BSDF.
I then set the diffuse color to a pinkish color.
I then changed the roughness to 0.3 and IOR to 3.7. I then went into
specular and changed the IOR Level to 1 to increase the front facing
reflectivity.
One last tweak to the spec, because satin involves lots of tiny threads
that make up the material, it actually has some anisotropy to the
specular (see my tutorial on Anisotropic
Reflections).
So go to the Specular area and set Anisotropy to 0.7 and Anisotropic
Direction to 0.25 to stretch those
reflections in the direction perpendicular to the thread direction.
I noticed that while the thread bumps are too fine to see in the
reference, there is some soft tiny bump, like the fabric has gone
through the wash a few times and so has some mild pilling which creates
this fuzz. So I ad a noise procedural for the bump, very tiny size. And
that brings us to the final render.
Here's the shader for 3dsmax for the vray renderer renderer.
So I started with a standard VrayMtl.
I then set the diffuse color to a darker red / brown.
I then changed the Reflection color to white, Glosiness to 0.4, and IOR
to 3.7 to increase the front facing reflectivity.
One last tweak to the spec, because satin involves lots of tiny threads
that make up the material, it actually has some anisotropy to the
specular (see my tutorial on Anisotropic
Reflections). So go to the BRDF area and set Anisotropy to 0.5 to
stretch those reflections in the direction perpendicular to the thread
direction.
I noticed that while the thread bumps are too fine to see in the
reference, there is some soft tiny bump, like the fabric has gone
through the wash a few times and so has some mild pilling which creates
this fuzz. So I ad a noise procedural for the bump, very tiny size.
I the felt the surface still felt ever so slighty rubbery, so I decided
to add just a tiny bit of subsurface scattering, since cloth is thin
enough I can imagine some light to bounce through the surface. And that
brings us to the final render.
