Fibric released — fabric made of curves instead of textures in Houdini

Agustin Gonzalez and Pepe Buendia have put Fibric on sale — a system for Houdini that builds fabric out of geometry: instead of textures and displacement maps, every thread is a separate curve available to the artist as data. The project has been known since late 2024, the authors showed the full workflow at FMX HIVE 2025, and now the tool is available under a commercial license.

The change of medium for detail is the main thing about this release. When a weave is painted into a texture, light does not pass between the threads and does not scatter on them. Fibric hands the renderer real strands, thanks to which, according to the developers' description, light behaves more naturally and the fabric gains additional depth and detail.

Every thread stays data

Since every thread is a curve, the usual procedural techniques of Houdini apply to it: masks, variations, selections, effects. Lookdev is driven by the material structure itself, and the weave structure can be changed without rebuilding the garment from scratch.

The toolset covers the path from a thread to a worn-out costume:

• Weave & Knit — woven and knitted structures through a dedicated interface and a built-in library of the main weave schemes and patterns;
• Stitches — stitch generation; the tool can also be stretched toward details such as embroidery, although the developers are still keeping a full-fledged embroidery module in their plans;
• Fuzz & Multifiber — additional layers of fuzz and fibers on top of the base;
• Damage & Tearing — wear, deformations and torn fibers; according to the authors, even barely noticeable damage noticeably changes the final result;
• Arbitrary Curves — import of curves generated outside the system. On the demo kimono the embroidery was made with a third-party Entagma workflow and then combined with Fibric stitches and controlled together through this node;
• Deform and Render-Time Deform — transferring Fibric fabric onto animated or simulated clothing, both as cached geometry and via a procedural at render time;
• Utility Nodes — helper tools, including the Texture Baker and the Export Configure node for organizing asset hierarchies;
• Fibric Shaders — shaders that use the system's data and provide additional procedural control already at the shading stage.

How the curves make it to the render

Fibric pulls the finished fabric onto animated or simulated clothing with its own deformation system, after which the result can be cached to USD or Alembic. There is a second path as well: a procedural for Solaris renders the fabric directly, supports Hydra delegates and different render pipelines, and does not require caching the whole deformation in advance.

Realtime is covered separately: the package includes baking the detailed fabric into textures, so the same asset goes into game engines such as Unreal Engine 5. The developers describe the scheme like this: a Fibric asset is built once and reused on different costumes and in different workflows.

What comes in the package and how much it costs

The system ships as ready-made HDAs with a visual procedural workflow — according to the authors, this makes it accessible to practically any artist. Along with the release came documentation and more than ten tutorial videos on the official YouTube channel, a preset library for setups and shaders that is promised to keep growing, and the character Leena — a production asset on which the developers demonstrated the system's capabilities and which is a convenient starting point.

Fibric is sold under three licensing schemes, including a perpetual Indie license.

"We have been developing Fibric for a very long time, so the public release is a huge milestone for us. The most interesting thing now is to see what artists will start doing with it, when they pull it in directions we never even thought of," commented Agustin Gonzalez and Pepe Buendia.

Why threads are being tackled right now

Fibric looks like part of a broader shift: in CG, detail is increasingly being moved from maps into procedural geometry that the renderer builds on the fly. Hair and fur went the same way in their time — first they were planes with alpha, then curves, and today groom is made as geometry by default. Fabric held out longer, probably because there is usually more of it in frame, which means a higher price in memory and render time. The arrival of procedurals that unfold geometry at the moment of rendering and require no cache removes exactly this barrier.

If the trend continues, close-ups of fabric may stop being a separate expensive task and become an ordinary stage in the costume pipeline, while the demands on clothing artists will shift toward an understanding of real textile structure — weaves, knits, stitching. For studios the main question here is one of resources: the curve approach wins where the camera is close enough, and every team will have to decide for itself where the border lies between threads as geometry and the familiar texture.