Experiments in cloth shading (4/7)
Added 2018-05-08 10:44:21 +0000 UTCSuccess!
At this point, the shader appears to be working reasonably well. It still doesn't support AOVs (for splitting up the diffuse/specular reflections) and a whole bunch of UI related things are hardcoded when they really shouldn't be, but the core BxDF code seems to be working well enough.
It's probably worth mentioning that the swimsuit itself has no texture images assigned to it. The fabric effect is strictly created at render time via the cloth shader, so the entire setup consumes next to zero memory (at the expense of some additional processing power).
The only real downside to this particular method is that the shading algorithm makes no attempt to consider the individual threads inside a yarn bundle, which means it's no good for extremely close up renders (like my previous system could kinda do). I'm pretty sure that's not going to be a problem though, since I highly doubt anyone is here to stare at macro shots of fabric swatches or anything...
