Exploring Immersive Real-Time Approaches in Procedural Texture Creation for Digital Fabrics

Project partners: University of the Arts London (UAL) Fashion Textiles and Technology Institute, UAL Creative Computing Institute, UAL London College of Fashion, Numerion Software

A project led by the UAL Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute is developing a collaborative extended reality (XR) environment for the creation of real-time digital fabrics.

The research team will design a prototype toolset to support the real-time processes of texturing and shading digital fabrics. The prototype will make Virtual Production (VP) tools accessible to dress and textiles practitioners so that they can previsualise a garment or costume design in real-time.

The project tackles digital textiles as a specific research challenge within the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Graphics. Most AI material workflows today focus on surfaces like stone, wood, or metal. Fabrics are much harder to represent because they rely on weave and knit structures, anisotropy, and subtle surface details that are often ignored in generic VP pipelines.

The development of a prototype toolset for the generation of fabric-related editable textures and shaders in real-time will also help evolve investigations on the integration of machine learning tools and algorithms into XR  pipelines and their implementation within Unreal Engine. This may then be used in a multiuser, collaborative virtual environment and will integrate both the creative workflows of fabric designers and 3D artists who wish to create more realistic digital fabric textures.

The collaboration will draw on expertise in AI and textiles from UAL’s Creative Computing Institute and  the London College of Fashion, respectively. Numerion Software will act in an advisory capacity, offering insights on software integration with Unreal Engine as the the only software developer in the world that specialises in real-time cloth simulation. 

The project is one of eight collaborations that received R&D funding from XR Network+ through the XR Labs Fund. The funding call awarded grants of up to £25,000 for university-led collaborations to develop extended reality prototypes using facilities at UK universities.

Image by UAL FTTI.

Categories: Fashion, Research, Technology