Twinbru’s 3D fabric textures are the digital twins of Bru Textiles’ trusted and beloved furnishing and drapery fabrics, completely identical to their physical counterparts in colour and characteristics. Creating these digital fabrics is no easy feat and, with over 14,000 fabrics digitised plus their availability on the world’s leading 3D design and digital visualisation platforms, the success has been creating a pipeline that ensures 3D designers are able to enjoy high-quality digital renders of fabrics that behave and look exactly the way the physical fabrics do in real life. But, how does Twinbru achieve this?
We’ve shared the innovation of the velvet shader project as well as the meticulous post-production process that ensures the digital fabrics are a true digital twin. We’ve also confidently stated that Twinbru is setting the industry standard when it comes to 3D fabric textures. By this we mean that Twinbru is unmatched in terms of the scale at which digital fabrics are created: our team produces thousands of digital fabric twins along with room scenes for every SKU. It’s also evident in the quality of our 3D fabric textures and the way they behave in digital models and renders. This has been possible through our choice of technology partners in V-Ray and X-Rite.
Perfect partners
X-Rite is a global leader in colour science and technology, specialising in solutions for measuring, managing, and communicating colour accurately across various industries. Industries such as printing, photography, design, and manufacturing rely on X-Rite’s expertise to maintain colour fidelity and quality. By providing innovative colour management solutions, X-Rite helps businesses achieve reliable and repeatable colour outcomes, enhancing overall product quality and customer satisfaction. Twinbru’s digital fabrics have provided both the hardware and software for the scanning of the fabrics to ensure every detail is accurately captured.
V-Ray is a powerful rendering engine developed by Chaos Group, known for its high-quality, photorealistic visualisations. Widely used in the fields of architecture, film, and gaming, V-Ray offers a comprehensive suite of tools for creating stunning images and animations. Its advanced lighting, shading, and rendering techniques enable artists and designers to achieve lifelike results with remarkable efficiency. In the process of creating Twinbru’s 3D fabric textures, we make use of a rendering engine developed by V-Ray for our digital asset pipeline and rendering.
So, one is used to physically digitise the fabrics through high-resolution scanning and the other is used to create the perfect digital imagery of the fabrics that designers can enjoy from various digital asset libraries.
It’s all about quality
When Twinbru was founded, a foundational value was established to always deliver the best and highest quality. That meant the creation of the 3D fabric textures had to be a process that was high quality as well.
“When we started the Twinbru journey, we looked at a number of scanning options and X-rite was by far the most qualitative. It’s a really high-end product - the Rolls Royce of material scanners.” Alec van Peel, Twinbru
X-Rite’s scanning capabilities are used by car manufacturers to scan paint samples, interior samples as well as other finishing samples to use in the development process. Using their technology made perfect sense for Twinbru to achieve the quality of scanning input it required to deliver the digital fabric twins that sets the standard for the textile industry. Prior to the scanning process used now, the team tried using photography and splicing the images together. It certainly didn’t create the digital product that everyone envisioned. X-Rite provided a high-quality, stable solution that couldn’t be found elsewhere.
As for V-Ray, this company has been leading the way for architectural visualisation for over two decades with a high level of development. With Twinbru’s Digital Asset Pipeline, thousands of images are rendered every day. It requires a robust workflow to meet the demand and V-Ray provides this.
“V-Ray has a very robust tool set. It allows us to do everything we want to do in terms of rendering with some additional benefits, like the ability to edit an image inside the program. It’s very programmable, which helps us create consistency in the images, and a big time saver as we render hundreds of images at the same time.” Alec van Peel, Twinbru
Working together to elevate industry standards
Twinbru is unique in that the team is very willing to share knowledge, share learnings, and collaborate with our technology partners to develop solutions. When we discovered the challenges of creating a 3D fabric texture of velvet, we reached out to the team at X-Rite to put the teams’ collective knowledge together. Combining X-Rite’s material scanning knowledge with Twinbru’s fabric knowledge led to the creation of a velvet shader program that overcomes the challenges of digitally capturing a fabric that has a high degree of randomness and reflects lights in a different way to other fabrics.
We’re an involved partner who is eager to share and experiment together to find the best possible outcomes. V-Ray has the Cosmos library where users with a subscription can download assets from their digital library and use it in their creations. As V-Ray’s partner, Twinbru was able to bring its fabric knowledge to the table, curating a big collection of 3D fabric textures that designers can engage with and utilise to boost their creativity. These digital fabrics are offered to their users for free, helping to elevate digital designs.
We are not in the business of gatekeeping our 3D fabric textures as the purpose of their creation is to make them accessible to digital designers and 3D artists who want high-quality realism and fabrics that can actually be purchased. There is a dedicated Twinbru Textures website available where you can explore and inspect our digital fabrics for yourself and allow your visions for interior spaces, metaverse spaces, and architectural creations to be as spectacular as your imagination desires.