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

https://youtu.be/nHKax44Ha_o

Transparency - used to give it transparency and let light through  | range 0 - 1

https://youtu.be/SQp6Fdo2kag

Specular - used to give some smooth reflectivity                             | range 0 - 6

https://youtu.be/7hXJ5REPNYk

Alpha Mix - used if the textures has alpha values                             | range 0 OR 1

https://youtu.be/hBl7m12dcUE

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