Creating digital fabric physics using Vizoo

How is a digital textile made, and how are real fabrics analysed, quantified, and translated into digital, manipulable versions?

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Material capture specialists Vizoo are among those companies making it possible to achieve advanced levels of realism in the world of texture mapping, courtesy of their scanning and software combination. Such development is becoming increasingly vital as the physical properties of fabrics, growing in importance as digital assets, help to determine how a material behaves when used in simulation.

INTRODUCING VIZOO

Vizoo, based in Haar, Germany, specialises in material capture and help digitise materials in the fashion, transport and furniture sectors, often to make digital twins. It has a combination of hardware and software in xTex and physX, as well as a digitisation service that allows clients to send in fabric swatches up to A2 size to have a digital version made.

Before this, Vizoo co-developed the U3M file format, an open-file format designed on GitHub to help streamline how multiple fabric properties, including both texture maps and physical properties data, are integrated into one file to be readable in different software.

HARDWARE: XTEX SCANNER

The first step in digitising a fabric swatch is to photograph it as accurately as possible under different lighting conditions, and to record different textural qualities each time it’s photographed. Vizoo’s xTex hardware is made up of a camera and blackbox setup, which has customisable light settings and filters to capture the fabric swatches in different conditions. Its scanning times range from 1-3 minutes per scan.