Explore How Fabric and Texture Are Drawn in Modern Gaming

Most of my working week is spent with real cloth. I wash linen samples at different temperatures, dry silk flat and on hangers, and photograph the results under the same lamp so I can compare them honestly. So it was a slightly strange experience, a while ago, to pause a game and realise I could tell what a character's dress was made of just by looking at it. The creases were linen creases. Not a generic wrinkle, but the soft, slightly broken folds that washed linen makes across the hips after you sit down.

That made me want to understand how game artists do it. How do you make a pattern of pixels read as linen rather than cotton, or silk rather than cheap satin? The answer turned out to be useful for anyone who buys real fabric, because the cues artists use are the same cues your eye uses in a shop.

What a game needs to fake a fabric

A garment in a modern game is built from a 3D shape covered in several image layers, usually called maps. Each one tells the game engine something different about the surface. You do not need the technical details to follow the idea, but the main layers are worth knowing.

• Color. The base color and any printed pattern. On its own, this makes everything look like painted plastic.
• Normal or bump detail. Tiny surface information that tells light where the weave rises and dips. This is where linen gets its slubs, the small thick spots in the yarn, and where knitwear gets its ribs.
• Roughness. How shiny or matte the surface is. Cotton and linen are fairly rough, so light scatters. Silk is smoother, so highlights are tighter.
• Sheen. A special soft glow at the edges of a surface, used for velvet and other fabrics with a pile. Without it, velvet looks like felt.

Most modern engines use what is called physically based rendering, which means artists describe real material properties and the engine works out how light should behave. That approach is a big reason fabrics in recent games look far more convincing than they did a decade ago.

Movement matters as much as surface

A still image can fool you. Movement is where fabric gives itself away. Real cloth has weight and stiffness, and those two qualities decide how it swings, how fast it settles and how it folds.

Game studios handle this with cloth simulation, which calculates how a garment should move as the character walks, turns or stands in the wind. Many artists also design clothing in tools such as Marvelous Designer, which builds garments from flat pattern pieces sewn together digitally, much like a real pattern. That is why a skirt in a recent game can have believable gathers at the waist and a natural fall to the hem.

When I watch characters move, I look at three things.

1. Settle time. Silk and light viscose keep moving for a moment after the body stops. Heavy linen and denim settle almost at once.
2. Fold size. Stiff fabrics make large, wide folds. Soft fabrics make many small ones.
3. Edge behavior. A hem that flutters suggests something light. A hem that swings like a pendulum suggests something heavier with a good drape.

Some games get all three right. Infinity Nikki, released in late 2024, is often praised by players for how much attention its clothing gets, and fashion focused games generally put more effort into this than action games do. In many action games, by contrast, cloth is stiff or only the cape moves, because processing power goes elsewhere.

Shiny does not mean silk

This is the point I most want readers to take away, because it applies directly to real shopping. A lot of people, and a lot of game art, treat shine as a shortcut for luxury. A glossy dress reads as silk. A matte one reads as cheap cotton.

In my testing, that is often backwards. Good silk, especially crepe de chine or a sandwashed silk, has a soft, low glow rather than a mirror shine. The highlight moves gently across the fabric as it bends. Inexpensive polyester satin is often far shinier, with hard, white highlights that sit on the surface. In photos under my lamp, the cheapest satin sample I own looks the most dramatic of the lot, and it is also the one that feels clammy on a warm day.

The better game artists know this. Their silk has controlled, soft highlights that follow the curve of the body, while their cheap or synthetic fabrics are given a harsher gloss. The less careful ones simply turn the shine up and call it silk. Once you notice the difference on screen, you will start noticing it on shop rails, which is the useful part.

Real silk glows. Cheap satin glares. Good game artists and good fabric buyers both learn to tell the two apart.

How games draw linen, and what that teaches about care

Linen is my favourite fabric to watch in games because it is hard to fake. Artists usually signal it with three cues: a slightly uneven surface with visible slubs, a matte finish, and soft creases that stay in place after the character moves. Those creases are the giveaway. Linen fibres do not spring back the way wool does, so folds stay.

In real life, those same creases are what people worry about most. I get more questions about linen wrinkles than about anything else. Seeing linen drawn with gentle, lived in creases in a game is a nice reminder that the wrinkles are part of the fabric's character, not a sign that you did something wrong. My full routine for keeping linen looking good, without fighting every crease, is in how to care for a linen dress so it lasts.

What I disagree with in the realism debate

Players sometimes argue that more realistic graphics automatically mean more accurate fabric. I do not think that holds up. I have seen highly detailed games where every dress moves like the same rubbery sheet, and simpler, stylised games where a cotton sundress swishes and settles exactly as it should. Accuracy depends on whether someone on the team understood the cloth, not only on the number of polygons.

Odette, who spent years in ateliers, makes a similar point in the fashion design hidden in game worlds: the best game costumes look like they were made by someone who has handled real garments.

A small test you can do at home

Take one real garment of each type you own, a linen dress, a cotton shirt and anything silk or satin. Hold each one under a single lamp and move it slowly. Watch where the highlights fall, how quickly the fabric settles, and what kind of folds form. Then load a game you play and look at a character's clothing with the same questions. After about ten minutes of this, most people I have tried it with can name fabrics in games more accurately, and, more usefully, they start choosing real fabrics with more confidence. For plain explanations of the real cloth, see the Fabrics section.