Fabric
Fabric overview
The six Craft steps that turn your seamless tile into a finished fabric, in order, and which ones matter most for embroidery, print, jacquard and velvet-like cloth.
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A fabric material is made in four phases: Begin, Prepare, Craft and Export. By the time you reach Craft, your image is at its final quality, set to its real size and made seamless. This section covers the Craft steps. The steps before them, and the export, are covered elsewhere in this guide.
The Craft steps in order
- What stands up: pick the parts of the design that are raised. Everything else stays flat cloth.
- Ground: set the cloth under the design: its weave, threads per centimetre and thread height.
- Height: set how far the raised parts stand, in millimetres at real size.
- Stitching: choose how the raised parts are made: satin, machine or hand stitches, knots, beads, quilting and more.
- Construction: optionally lay a finish over everything: velvet, chenille, silk, suede or cotton.
- Imperfections: optionally add small, believable signs of use.
After these comes Export, which builds every choice into the full-quality maps.
How each step builds on the last
Each step works on the result of the ones before it. What stands up decides where the relief goes. Ground fills everything you left flat. Height lifts your picked parts, and Stitching lays its stitches on that height. A Construction goes on top of the finished material and never changes the steps before it. Imperfections go on top of all of it.
From Ground on, the panel shows a Builds on row: the earlier Craft steps with a short summary of each. Click one to go back to it. You can change an earlier step and return: the later steps rebuild their maps with your change.
The 3D view follows the step you are on:
- Before Ground, the cloth shows no weave.
- Before Stitching, the raised parts stand plain: a flat top in the image's colour, no stitches yet.
- The construction and the imperfections appear at their own steps.
The export always builds every choice from every step.
Which steps matter for your fabric
Every fabric goes through all six steps, but some steps shape the look more than others. The heights below are the ones the Height step suggests on screen.
| Your fabric | Raised height | Steps to spend time on |
|---|---|---|
| Embroidery | 1 to 2 mm | What stands up (the stitched motifs) and Stitching (the stitch that matches your sample) |
| Jacquard | 0.2 to 0.4 mm | What stands up (the woven pattern) and Ground (the weave around it) |
| under 0.1 mm | Ground (the cloth the print sits on) and, if you like, a Construction for the cloth's character | |
| Puff embroidery, padded work, quilting | 5 to 10 mm | Height, then a padded type in Stitching such as Quilted or Vermicelli |
| Velvet, chenille, silk, suede, cotton | what your design needs | Construction: pick the family and kind, then set Glossier than the cloth |
What stands up always needs at least one raised part before you can continue. For a print, keep the raised height very low, as the Height step suggests.
Before you start the Craft steps
- Scale matters. Every Craft step works at the real size you set in Scale. If your cushion is made of 2 × 2 or more images, the picker and the side view show the whole cushion, while the export stays one tile.
- Each step must be ready before you move on. For example, What stands up keeps Continue unavailable until the shapes are read and at least one part is raised.
Tip: Use Light in the 3D view's toolbar to turn the lights round the object. Relief and gloss read best when the light rakes across the cloth.