Chapter 3 – Fabric scanning pitfalls shine micro normals

Chapter 3: Fabric Scanning Pitfalls

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Fabric Scanning Pitfalls (Shine & Micro‑Normals) for Costume Concept Artists

Scans, Wardrobe & Photogrammetry – Capture & Integration

When fabric is scanned for a game character, it’s easy to imagine you’re capturing “the truth” of the material once and for all. In practice, fabric is one of the trickiest things to scan cleanly. Shine, weave, micro‑wrinkles, embroidery, and even lint can all turn into problems later: noisy normal maps, flickering highlights, and textures that are almost impossible to tweak without starting over.

Costume concept artists—both on the concepting side and the production side—sit right at the beginning of this chain. The fabrics you design, how shiny you make them, how dense the patterns are, and where you put visual noise all affect how well those materials can be captured and integrated. You don’t need to be a scanning technician, but having a mental map of common fabric scanning pitfalls helps you design smarter and give better notes when problems show up.

This article focuses on two big troublemakers:

Shine – how specular and reflective fabrics misbehave during capture.
Micro‑normals – tiny surface bumps, weaves, and wrinkles that become noisy, unstable data.

We’ll keep circling back to what this means for capture & integration: how your decisions help wardrobe and scan teams capture usable data, and how character art and tech art can turn those scans into clean, flexible materials in‑engine.

1. How Scanners “See” Fabric

Before looking at specific pitfalls, it helps to understand, in simple terms, what scanners and photogrammetry pipelines are trying to do.

A scan or photogrammetry setup usually captures:

The shape of the garment in 3D (geometry and volume).
The surface detail as displacement or normal information (micro folds and texture).
The color and brightness of the surface (albedo and sometimes roughness or specular hints).

The problem is that the camera doesn’t know what is “true color” and what is lighting, shadows, or reflections from the studio setup. Highly reflective or heavily textured fabrics blur this boundary. The result is often:

Normals full of random, high‑frequency noise instead of clean, readable folds.
Albedo maps with baked‑in lighting, dark corners, and bright hotspots.
Surfaces that look fine in a flat render but flicker, shimmer, or break when animated in game.

As a costume concept artist, you can’t rewrite the scanner software, but you can influence what kind of fabric behavior the scanner has to deal with—and help determine how that data will be used later.

2. Shine Pitfalls: When Specular Eats Your Scan

Shiny materials—satins, silks, vinyl, patent leather, sequins, metallic threads—look gorgeous in a concept painting. In capture, however, they can be temperamental. The scanner sees not only the fabric but also bright, moving reflections of the lights and environment.

During photogrammetry, multiple photos from different angles are used to reconstruct the surface. If a highlight moves or changes shape between shots, the software can treat it like real geometry or color variation. This leads to:

Blown‑out patches where highlights clip and lose texture information.
Fake bumps and pits in the normal map where the solver tries to explain bright/dark changes as height.
Patchy roughness where one area of the fabric looks unnaturally glossy or dull in the final material.

From a capture & integration perspective, heavy shine can make it very hard to get a neutral base material that responds correctly to in‑game lighting.

2.1 Concept‑Side: Designing Shine with the Pipeline in Mind

On the concepting side, you have enormous influence over how much trouble shine will cause later. This doesn’t mean avoiding shiny materials entirely, but rather:

Choosing where shine lives. Concentrate the gloss on smaller, controlled areas (trim, piping, small panels) rather than huge surfaces like full‑length vinyl coats.
Balancing matte and glossy. Pair shiny accents with larger matte regions so those big surfaces can be captured cleanly while gloss is recreated later via shaders.
Communicating “true” vs “hero” shine. In your notes, distinguish between the physical base material and additional “beauty lighting” or FX you’re painting. This tells downstream teams which shine must be grounded in the scan and which can be treated as post‑process or shader work.

You can solve a lot of headaches simply by designing shiny fabrics in a way that’s easier to capture, then letting lookdev and shaders do the heavy lifting for the final highlights.

2.2 Wardrobe & Capture: Taming Real‑World Shine

On the production side, once fabrics are chosen, there are still ways to make shiny materials more scan‑friendly:

Lighting control. Softer, more diffuse lighting reduces sharp, moving hotspots on glossy surfaces.
Polarizing filters. In some setups, polarizers help reduce specular reflections so more of the true base color and texture is captured.
Temporary dulling. For extremely glossy items, wardrobe and scan teams may lightly dull the surface for capture, then restore the intended high gloss later in shaders.

As a production‑side costume artist, you can support this by:

Signing off on slight appearance differences during capture if it means more usable data.
Providing notes like, “Coat can be scanned slightly less shiny; final hero gloss to be restored in material.”

This keeps people from panicking when the capture doesn’t match the highly polished concept image blow‑for‑blow.

2.3 Integration: Separating Albedo from Lighting

After scanning, one of the biggest shine‑related tasks is cleaning baked‑in lighting out of the textures. Dark seams, bright creases, and directional highlights don’t belong in albedo; they should come from the shading model in‑engine.

Concept artists can help by:

Providing flat material swatches or paintover chips that show the color and value of the fabric without dramatic lighting.
Marking in paintovers which bright/dark regions are real patterns and which are just studio lighting or wrinkles that should be neutralized.

This guidance helps texture artists decide what to preserve and what to even out when they rebuild roughness and albedo maps.

3. Micro‑Normals: When Detail Becomes Noise

The other big culprit in ugly fabric scans is micro‑normal noise. This is what happens when very tiny surface features—fine weave patterns, micro‑wrinkles, small threads, lint, subtle pilling—get captured as intense normal information.

At first glance, this can look impressive in a static render. Zoomed in, you see every fiber and crease. But at game scale and in motion, that dense micro detail can:

Produce shimmering and crawling when the character moves or the camera pulls back.
Overwhelm the larger, more important folds that define silhouette and shape.
Cause uneven shading when combined with compression or mipmapping.

The engine doesn’t know which bump is important and which is random lint; it treats them all equally. As a result, the material feels noisy instead of readable.

3.1 Concept‑Side: Designing Fold and Pattern Scale

As a concept artist, you can influence micro‑normal behavior by how you think about scale of detail:

Emphasize medium‑scale folds and shapes that will still read when compressed into normal maps and viewed at distance.
Avoid relying on ultra‑fine patterns (hairline pinstripes, micro herringbone, extremely small quilting) as major visual identity for in‑game reads.
Clearly separate big fold families (gravity, posture) from decorative texture (quilting, stitching) in your design.

Then, in your callouts, you can say things like:

“Quilting pattern is subtle; OK if visible mostly in close‑ups.”
“Primary shape language lives in these large folds; micro wrinkles can be simplified.”

This gives character and texture artists permission to smooth out noise while preserving the core design.

3.2 Capture Pitfalls: Over‑Resolving Small Features

During scanning, it’s tempting to get as close as possible to capture maximum detail. But there’s a trade‑off: if you over‑resolve tiny fibers and bumps, you end up baking a lot of sub‑pixel chaos into the maps.

Common pitfalls include:

Capturing at a resolution that is far higher than what will be used in game, then downscaling and compressing, which turns clean detail into noisy blotches.
Using fabrics with very busy surface textures for large areas of the costume, so the scanner can’t find a stable, repeating pattern.

As a production‑side artist, you can work with scan teams by:

Suggesting test patches: scan a small swatch first, view it in the target engine or viewer at final resolution, and check for shimmer or noise.
Flagging fabric choices where pattern frequency is likely to be problematic and proposing simpler alternatives.

3.3 Integration: Re‑Authoring Micro Detail

Once micro‑normal noise is captured, it doesn’t have to be accepted as is. Character and tech art can:

Blur or soften micro detail in the normal maps, preserving only the larger folds.
Bake out big forms from the scan and then layer separate, clean tiling fabrics for fine weave or knit patterns.
Use multi‑layer materials where scan data provides macro shape and a curated micro normal provides fabric texture.

Concept artists can support this by:

Supplying or approving idealized tiling fabric samples that represent the intended weave or knit at a stable scale.
Marking which micro details are non‑essential so they can be replaced with cleaner, procedural textures.

When everyone treats the scan as one layer of truth among several, micro‑normal noise becomes something you selectively mine, not a cage you’re stuck in.

4. Patterns, Moiré, and Directionality

Beyond shine and random micro‑bumps, patterned fabrics bring their own pitfalls, especially tight repeating patterns like checks, stripes, houndstooth, or tiny geometric motifs.

On camera, these can produce moiré—strange interference patterns that appear when the pattern frequency clashes with the sensor and downscaling. In scans, something similar can happen when:

Fine patterns get sampled inconsistently across angles.
The solver interprets high‑contrast patterns as height changes.
Texture compression in engine turns crisp patterns into blurry or shimmering mush.

For costume concept artists, this means:

Avoid using very tight, high‑contrast patterns as the main identity on large surfaces, especially if the game will be played on lower‑resolution screens.
Prefer slightly larger‑scale motifs or softer contrast for repeating patterns you expect to be captured and seen in motion.
Clearly tag pattern importance: “Pattern can be softened at distance,” or “Key identity; must remain readable even when simplified.”

Production‑side, these notes help texture artists decide where to redesign patterns as vector or tiling textures after capture instead of just relying on the raw scan.

5. Capture → Integration: Deciding What the Scan Is For

One of the most helpful mindset shifts is to stop treating scan data as “the final asset” and start treating it as rich reference plus macro form.

Ask, as a team:

Is this scan mainly for shape (volume and folds)?
For material cues (how light falls, where wear accumulates)?
For texture reuse (swatches that will be turned into tiling patterns)?

The answer can be “all of the above,” but it’s rarely equal. Knowing the primary purpose helps everyone decide how to handle shine and micro detail.

5.1 Using Scans for Shape and Macro Folds

If the main goal is shape, then:

Prioritize capturing clean volume and major fold families, even if some surface detail is sacrificed.
Allow more aggressive smoothing and retopology later to remove noisy micro‑normals.
Rebuild fine fabric texture with more controlled tiling normals and roughness maps.

Concept artists can help by marking on their callouts which fold flows are sacred and which are flexible.

5.2 Using Scans for Material Cues

If the scan is mostly a material study, it may not even be used directly as a final map. Instead, teams will look at it to understand:

How light transitions across satin vs velvet in similar lighting.
Where natural wear appears on knees, cuffs, seams, and edges.
What the base color and roughness really look like under neutral light.

Here, your role as a concept artist is to connect these observations to the story:

“These wear zones match the character kneeling and resting arms on railings; please preserve that pattern of distress.”
“We like the soft highlight falloff on this fabric; replicate that in shader even if the raw scans are noisy.”

5.3 Using Scans as Texture Source

If the goal is to extract textures, then shine and micro‑normal management matters hugely. You might:

Scan flat swatches instead of full garments to control lighting and avoid complex folds.
Use those swatches to build clean, tileable albedo and normal maps, then map them onto sculpted geometry separately.

As a concept artist, you can suggest which fabrics are good candidates for swatch‑based capture (uniform weave, subtle pattern) versus which should be mostly authored by hand (highly stylized or physically impossible fabrics).

6. Practical Collaboration: Concept & Production Side

Whether you’re drawing the first outfit sketches or reviewing final scans, there are a few practical habits that help avoid the worst fabric scanning pitfalls.

6.1 For Concept‑Side Costume Artists

First, design with scanning in mind:

Think in layers of detail: big shapes, medium folds, small surface texture. Don’t cram all the interest into micro detail that will become noise.
Be intentional about where shine lives and how much of the costume relies on extremely reflective materials.
Avoid depending on tiny high‑contrast patterns as the sole way to distinguish teams or ranks.

Second, annotate your designs for downstream teams:

Specify base material properties (matte vs satin vs glossy) separately from “beauty pass” lighting effects.
Mark non‑negotiable details vs. “okay to simplify” areas in notes or color coding.
Provide neutral material swatches that show appearance without dramatic lighting.

These small additions help everyone know how to interpret and clean up the scan later.

6.2 For Production‑Side Costume Artists

You’re often the bridge between concepts and actual scan outputs. You can:

Collaborate with wardrobe and scanning teams to choose fabrics and lighting setups that minimize the worst shine and micro‑noise.
Review early test scans and flag where normal maps look too crunchy, shiny surfaces blew out, or patterns turned to mush.
Create quick paintovers on top of scan renders indicating where to smooth, where to preserve, and where to replace with procedural detail.

Your feedback turns scanning from a black box into a controlled step in the pipeline.

7. Building a Studio Playbook for Fabric Scans

Over time, it’s helpful for teams to build a fabric scanning playbook—a shared memory of what works and what doesn’t for your specific engine, hardware, and art style.

Costume concept artists can contribute by:

Documenting examples of successful fabric scans and calling out why they worked (controlled shine, good pattern scale, clean macro folds).
Saving paintovers that show “before and after” of noisy scans that were cleaned successfully, so future projects can follow the same patterns.
Working with tech art to translate artistic goals (“luxurious satin with broad highlights, minimal shimmer”) into practical capture rules (swatch scans, limited use of real gloss, reliance on shaders).

As this playbook grows, new costumes benefit from hard‑earned knowledge rather than repeating the same painful mistakes.

8. From Pitfalls to Possibilities

Shine and micro‑normals will probably always be tricky parts of fabric scanning. But they don’t have to be mysterious or terrifying. As a costume concept artist, you can:

Design fabrics and patterns that cooperate with scanning rather than fight it.
Give clear, visual guidance about which details matter most and which can be simplified.
Help decide whether a scan is mainly for shape, material cues, or texture source, so downstream teams know how to treat the data.

When you approach fabric scanning with this collaborative mindset, the process stops being a source of random pitfalls and becomes a powerful tool in your costume pipeline. Your designs move more smoothly from sketch to wardrobe to scan to engine—and players experience fabrics that look rich, behave believably, and remain readable across all cameras and lighting setups.

In other words: you’re not just drawing pretty cloth. You’re helping build a world where every fold, shine, and stitch can survive the journey into the game—and still look intentional when it gets there.