Blender 3D Fuzzy Fabric Tutorial

What's up, everybody? Today, we're going to be looking at how to create this fuzzy fabric material in Blender. First up, I'm in the middle of the move. My background is undecorated. There are boxes everywhere. It's messy. I'm sorry, but you're not here to look at my office. You're here to look at the tutorial, so let's dive into that. Now, I've been doing these kind of like fuzzy fabrics on my characters, doing this kind of more handcrafted look, and I've gotten a lot of comments both on Instagram and YouTube asking how I make these fuzzy materials. So today, we're gonna look at how I do that. And the answer is, it's actually pretty simple. There's actually a lot of free image-based fabrics out there, so I will put a link to that in the description below, and I'll be utilizing one of these materials in the tutorial so that you can follow along. Now, where the real magic of the fuzzy fabric tutorial comes in is how you input it into the shader settings using Sheen and how you use particle systems. So let's take a look at how I do that. So what we're going to do is first, we're going to import our shader. So if you have Node Wrangler add-on enabled, which is free in Blender, this will make this process much easier. So I'm going to open the shader editor here, and here is where I kind of have my cloth material there, and I'm going to grab this Principled BSDF. And then with Node Wrangler, you can hit Control-Shift-T. And what that will do, we'll open up this menu where you can import different options here. So what I'm going to do is come into my fabric folder, which I've downloaded, and what I'm going to do is select color, then I'm just going to also select the PNG, and then Blender uses OpenGL, so we'll grab the GL one here. I'm going to ignore opacity, we don't need that, and I'm going to grab roughness. Now, if you have an import issue, you can sometimes check off relative path here, and that'll prevent it from giving you an import error sometimes. And then we're just going to go ahead and click that there. And you'll see that what it does is it automatically puts all of our maps here into the correct ones. One thing I like to do is in this mapping here to make things easier to resize, I like to go Shift-A, and then I search for a value node. I'm going to put that here, tag that in there, and then what that'll do is make it so we can easily scale. So I'm going to go ahead and try five. And I want this to look like a miniature in my case, so I'm going to have kind of larger than life proportions for mine, but you can do yours as you see fit. And then here, by default, whenever you use that Node Wrangler add-on, it's going to do by your UV, which in my case works for the most part. My UVs aren't too bad on this model, but you can also do generated, and that'll try and best guess, which can sometimes cause issues on more complex objects like this. If you're just rendering a still image, you can actually do form camera, and a lot of times that'll be easier. But for me, I'm just going to use UV since I have a good UV there. But anyways, now what we can do is we can begin playing with these settings a bit. So I'm going to switch over to render view so we can see what we're doing here. Now, one thing is that I see a lot of people import these fabric textures, and then they're not happy with the way that it looks by default. And that's because by default, with the VSDF shader, you get a zero on your sheen. So sheen is actually a type of roughness specifically made for fabrics because fabrics tend to kind of catch the edge of the light and will have a little bit of sheen or reflection on the edge. So if we go ahead and turn this up to one, we can see already over here as this is coming in that this is starting to look a lot more like fabric. Let me do that one more time so you can see that. If I top this down to zero, you can see how the light reflects over here. And if we bump this up to one, you can see it immediately begins looking a lot more like fabric as it's kind of catching that light around the edges. The next thing is that what really kind of sells fabric realism, in my opinion, is kind of the buzz on fabrics. So what we can do is we're going to add a particle system. And I'm going to just go here with our shark chosen. And then I've actually created a vertex group called clothes. And if I tab into here, I have everything that has my clothing material on it selected. And if you don't have that, you just select everything that has clothing and then you just go ahead and click assign and it'll do that. So then what I can do is come back out here to object mode. I'm going to come down here to the particle system. We're going to add particles. I'm going to switch over to solid view to make this a bit easier. So what we're going to do is we're going to do hair. And we'll see that that just starts shooting out in every single direction. And first, what I want to do is adjust the hair length. For some reason, by default, it is four meters. I've never understood why. Let's start with 0.1, something really short. And that's looking great already. Here we have five segments and we're going to want to add a bit of curls to our hair. And each segment kind of gives us another point on the hair that we can curl up. We're going to need to adjust the viewport display to show that. So right now, strand sets set to two. We're going to set that to five so that we can accurately see there. Now what we're going to do is come down here to vertex groups. We only want this to appear on our clothes. So I'm going to go ahead, grab the clothes here and you'll see that it begins there. I have a small selection error down here. So just ignore that. I'm sure you can make fun of me in the comments if you like. So let's come up here. And what we can do is start playing with the look of our hair. So right now it's just straight little hair everywhere and we don't want that. And we also kind of want more. So right here by default, it's set to a thousand but if we turn on this children here, it'll start creating child particles for every one of those thousands. And we don't need quite that many. So I'm going to pump this down to 500 and turn this up so that the display amount matches the render amount. And you can see that we're getting a lot of fur. So next up, let's start kind of messing with this fuzz here to make it look a bit more fuzzy. So first of all, by default, the settings here on the hair shape are quite big. You'll notice that the diameter roots one meter. So I'd like to take this down to kind of 0.1 or 0.25 and that'll make the hair a bit smaller at the root. So if I switch over here to render view, we can start to see what that's looking like. And by default, it's going to kind of just render that top material, which is not what we want. What we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our material plane. We're going to add a new slot. We're going to call this fabric fuzz. And then we're going to delete this BSDF here. We're going to hit shift A search and we're going to look for hair. We want to add this principle hair BSDF. And to make our particles actually recognize that, what we need to do is go into the particle settings, come down here to render, and we'll see here that we have the choice for material. So we're going to go ahead and put that as our new fabric fuzz. And we can see that kind of coming in with our color there. And we can see here that it's adapting to this kind of brown that we have here, which is not what we want. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose kind of a color off of here and I'm going to want a lighter color. Fuzz tends to kind of look lighter when it's hit by the light, but we can kind of accent that by choosing a color from there. And you can see already that's starting to look a lot more natural. Of course, it's a little too long and still not curly and there's a little too much of it. So let's work on refining what that fuzz looks like. I'm going to switch back here to solid blue. And what we're going to do is start playing with the look of our fuzz. So first let's play with the shape of our fuzz. Then we'll kind of play with the amount of the fuzz. So what I'm going to do is come down here under children and you'll see that we have a lot of options here. So when you have fuzz on your clothes, it tends to kind of like curl up and wrap back into the fabric and it tends to kind of be rough and all over the place. And it tends to kind of clump up an area. So what we can do is take this clump here. We can turn that up just a tiny bit. We don't want too much there. Then we can click clump noise here and that'll prevent it from getting too much. And we'll set this to a smaller number like 0.25. And what that'll do is just give us a bit of randomness with clumping there. I still think that's a little too much. So I might lower that to just 0.05. And there we go. That's looking a bit more natural. For the roughness, we can just add a bit of uniform roughness. And what that's going to do is just add a little bit of roughness to everything overall. And you can see how that's starting to help. And then what we can do now here is come down here to this kink. Now what kink will do is give you different types for kind of how that hair interacts. So you'll spiral, braid, wave, curl, and all these others. I'm going to choose curl here. And you see that things get a little crazy at first. And that's because this amplitude is set so high that it's making the hair kind of explode in size. So if we lower this down, you can see that it starts to look a lot more natural. So I'm going to do something like 0.05 and see how that looks. Now I think we have too much, but I think that can mostly be fixed with the children amount. So we have a hundred particles for every one hair particle. So we can go back and forth in between these two numbers. So what we could do is bump this up to a thousand and you see that we get more hair coverage overall. And what we can come down here to the display amount is we can come down and see what that would look like and maybe 25. And we can see that's looking a lot more natural. And then we can go ahead, change our render amount to 25 so that that matches. And then down here, we have the length. Now we may not want all of our child particles to be the same length as our hair length. So what I like to do is sometimes take this down to about 0.5 and you can see things are looking a lot better already. I still feel like this is a little too long. So you can keep playing with that. And depending on the size of your character and the size of your object, you know, if you're way out here, you're going to want to be able to see it. And you can see that once we come over here, things are looking quite a bit more natural. I still feel like some of this fuzz is a bit too long. So I'm going to go ahead and change this child length to just like 0.15, something really short there. And we can see we're starting to get a much more natural fuzz. Now, one more important note when you're trying to have fabric on your character is actually the lighting as well. So if you think that the fuzz is kind of what really sells the realism of your fabric, then you need to make sure that fuzz is visible. So what I make sure to do in these scenes is that I actually have a light that blasts it from behind that will kind of help highlight that fuzz on that edge. And with that, that's kind of how I go about making fabric in my scenes. And I hope that you found this useful. Let me know what else you'd like to see in the comments below. I actually have a full texturing course if you're interested in seeing that as well, which you may find helpful. I'll link to that in the description below as well. And then as usual, please tag me at Southern Jotty on Instagram. I love seeing what you create from these tutorials.