Advanced Curtain Shader
Welcome to Advanced Curtain Shader!
A professional tool aimed at giving your renderings a photorealistic look, boosting the realism on your scene with physically-correct curtains and fabric
While this is not an all-round fabric shader - for example on wool or denim - it is capable of much more than simple curtains! You can use it for pillows, sofas and couches, rugs and carpets and even lace
The four main controls and their functions are:
Translucency - used to make the material glow under direct light | range 0 - 3
Transparency - used to give it transparency and let light through | range 0 - 1
Specular - used to give some smooth reflectivity | range 0 - 6
Alpha Mix - used if the textures has alpha values | range 0 OR 1
Available inputs are:
Color In - it can be either an image texture or an RGB input
Alpha In - if the texture has alpha values, the alpha output goes here
The look of the shader is heavily dependent on geometry: for maximum results, use real-world sizes - such as 1 or 0.5 mm thickness for thin curtains and veils
Best Practices
Every sheet of thin fabric has at least some translucency, so generally it is best to avoid setting this parameter at 0, unless a very worn-out and dirty look is desired. Typical values range from 0.1 to 0.7 - Translucency is highly influenced by how much light hits the model
Transparency is dependent on thickness, so using a 2 dimensional plane without a solidify modifier will make the model see-through even at low values such as 0.1 / 0.2 || However, setting it at zero will always disable transparency, no matter how thin the geometry is
The files include Advanced Curtain Shader for Blender version 2.8x and 2.9x
Settings, textures and models depicted in the images are not included
Render setup included - HDRi is CC0 from www.hdrihaven.com