Have you ever wondered why there seem to be no good leather textures available on the market? We did. And now we know why.

Leather had been on our to-do list for a long time. A steady stream of e-mails asking for a leather collection kept us aware of the strong demand. But we knew that technology simply wasn’t ready to do leather (and other materials like it) justice. After almost three years of R&D, we were finally ready to take on the task. And what a challenge it proved to be!

We are therefore especially proud to present this first installment of our brand-new Design|Craft series: A collection of high-quality leather textures that hopefully will make the life of anyone doing interior visualizations a bit easier.

Main Features

Leather Textures

47 multi-layered, high-resolution textures of 26 leather types

New Process

Inovative new scanning process, capturing detailed 3D surface structure

Materials

Ready-to-use material settings for Maxwell Render™

129,00 

excl. VAT

    Learn more about our licensing models here.

Details

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Leather Textures

This collection contains 26 different leather texture sets. We carefully chose a wide range of types and styles of leather commonly used for furniture and interior decoration. Apart from a plethora of standard leathers, there are also various vintage and rustic leathers, leathers with special coatings and treatments, suede and split leathers, as well as a number of exotic leathers.

Design|Craft #1, Size vs. ResolutionDesign|Craft #1, Size vs. Resolution

Area vs. Resolution

Most textures come in two different size/resolution variants. One with a larger surface area (up to 2.5m²) at a lower resolution, and one that provides a higher resolution for a smaller area (up to 500dpi). This allows for both, large-scale applications on furniture, as well as small-scale applications in close-up.

Diffuse Map
Normal Map
Bump Map
Specular Map
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Map Types

Along with a range of color variations, each texture primarily consists of a normal map and a reflectivity map, which play an essential role in producing authentic rendering results.

Additionally, a bump map is provided for cases where a normal map cannot be used. This map could also serve as a displacement map where appropriate, e.g. the exotic leathers.

Design|Craft #1, Color Variations

Color Variations

Every texture comes with 10 to 18 pre-made color variations.

Custom color templates

Although we tried to create a balanced color palette for every leather, you might need/want a particular leather in a particular color. For this purpose we have included easy to use template files for Adobe Photoshop™ that allow you to quickly create custom diffuse maps for any leather and in any color.

Our New Scanning Process

Leather is one of these materials the appearance of which is defined in large part by their surface structure, not just surface color. So we knew from the outset that our conventional approach wouldn’t do.

Instead we developed an entirely new photo-optical scanning process, consisting of custom hardware and software that allows us to capture a multiplicity of surface characteristics of nearly any kind of physical material. Most importantly, it can capture 3D surface and roughness information at pixel resolution. Other properties such as opacity, translucency and anisotropy can also be captured, which we will use for later products.

With this new scanning process we are able to digitize materials with an arbitrary surface area at (almost) arbitrary resolutions.

Early tests proved promising already

How It Works

We start with a series of photographs of the surface under different and very carefully controlled lighting conditions. All these images are then fed into a custom piece of software that basically tries to answer the following question: If the surface looks like this in this image and like that in that image, what would the surface’s 3D structure necessarily need to look like?

Doing this for each pixel in a large number of individual image pairs makes it possible to create a precise reconstruction of the original surface. Other surface properties are extracted in similar ways, e.g. using polarized light or high-dynamic range image data.

There is of course a lot more to it and a number of unforeseen difficulties – most of which on the hardware side – had to be overcome to make it all work. The final process ended up being rather involved and taking lots of time and processing power. But we think the results are worth the effort and speak for themselves.

Thousands of images need to be processed for each texture
Design|Craft #1, Close Up
Convincing results even in close-up

Downloads

  • Reference Guide – Design|Craft-1

    Reference guide book for Design|Craft – Volume One (Upholstery Leather), 29 pages.

    pdf | 18.8 MB – Download

Specifications

Textures

  • 26 leather textures
  • Textures consists of diffuse, normal, bump and reflectivity maps
  • Between 10 and 18 color variations for every leather
  • Two different scale/resolution variants for most leathers
  • Map resolution approx. 8000px x 8000px at up to 500dpi
  • Normal, bump and refl. maps in lossless compressed PNG format
  • Diffuse maps in high-quality JPEG format
  • 831 .png and .jpg files in total

Templates

  • Custom color templates for all textures (Adobe Photoshop™)
  • 47 .psd files in total

Materials

  • Ready-to-use material setups for Maxwell Render™ (version 3.1 and up)
  • 722 .mxm files in total

Packaging

  • Cardboard case, containing 5 DVD
  • Size: 13.5 x 19 x 2.2 cm
  • Weight: 240g
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