Reference from Day 1

So what are we looking for?

Since the anime provides somewhat varying styles of thread, let’s create a system that allows for these styles.

Let’s condense down our reference image and see exactly what we should be focusing on here, and stare at it for hours until we reach a state of textural enlightenment.

Here are some key tools I think we can use to replicate this effect:

• An repeating crossweave texture. It reminds me of indigenous flax weaving techniques.

• High-contrast noise

And I’m thinking we could use regular noise if we wanted to add saturation and/or contrast variation over the length of the thread, looking at the mobius strip bundle.

The Process

Let’s first start on the crossweave texture! I have a plan for this so far.

• Create a vertical stripe texture and a horizontal stripe texture
• Composite one on top of the other using a checkerboard texture
• Rotate the texture 45 degrees
• Stretch it vertically

Implementing this into blender, we get the following:

First, a node group that generates vertical stripes using texture coordinates, ping-pong (a sort of back-and-forth repeating function), and a color ramp to control the stripe thickness.

Procedural Crossweave