How Bandicoot tiling works

Tiling is needed to create seamless fabrics from a scan of a fabric swatch. The tiled digital fabric can then be repeated to cover an entire garment in 3D, giving effectively infinite yardage from a single scan.

Fashion CADs expect digital fabrics to be rectangular and for all sides to join seamlessly when the rectangle is repeated on the garment pattern.

The issues with creating that seamless rectangular tile from a fabric scan are:

• The weave or stitching needs to join up across the seam
• If the weave or stitching is loose, then weave or stitch lines might be slightly curved when scanned, and that needs to be straightened out to create a seamless tile
• If there is a patterned repeat, at least one whole pattern needs to fit inside the tile, and the pattern needs to join up across the seam
• If the fabric has a lot of natural variation, then the tile needs to be large enough to capture that natural variation so that the fabric on the garment doesn't look too uniform or obviously repetitive
• The scan may have changes in brightness or texture that need to be evened out so that the tiles are not visible when the tile is repeated across the garment
• There may be blemishes in the scan that need to be avoided when creating a tile
• For materials with random variations, such as crushed velvet or grainy leather, a straight seam can be highly visible, so a curved path is needed to blend the seam in with the natural material variations

Our tiling engine uses several techniques to create a seamless tile:

• We detect the fine weave or stitching to straighten any curve in the weave and stitch lines and to join the weave or stitch across the seams
  • This uses a Bandicoot technology called WeaveLock to detect "weave cells" which are the smallest repeating shapes in the weave or stitch
  • This technology is used throughout our main "Automatic tiling" mode
• We detect patterned repeats and use as many of the scanned repeats as we can find in the scan to fill the tile
  • The tile will contain a whole number of repeats, such as 1, 2 or 12 repeats, so that the repeat always joins up across the tile seams
  • The patterned repeat can also be set manually using the weave cells as a guide
  • For unpatterned fabrics, repeat pattern detection can be switched off
• A tiling zone can be used to limit which area of the scan is available for tiling, to avoid blemishes or reduce the effect of uneven appearance in the scan
• Sometimes it is necessary to create the tile seams manually. We have a Manual tiling mode which allows you set manually place the tile corners and to set pairs of control points on matching features on either side of the tile.
• Flattening is used to reduce variation and create an even appearance for the repeated tile
  • Tile flatten automatically matches the contrast and colour across the tile seams
  • Extra flattening can be fine tuned for additional flattening to reduce variation inside the tile

Recipe

Log into the web app, click on the material and then click Enter tiling editor.