Fabric folds brushes for Photoshop CS2
It wasn't until someone said something on the Second Life forums that I realized that people could use the fabric folds brushes I'd been playing with. So I took what I had, threw together some more, and made this tutorial to show how to use them. These are not perfect, but they're a start.

The Brushes

How to use the brushes:

Most of the brushes are 512 x 512. They're freely distributable, just don't claim they're yours and sell them. You can resize them, scale them, warp them, whatever you need to do to make your fabric look good. But for now we'll take a look at the plain unaltered brush.

Here's the fabric we're starting with. I'm not doing anything to this image-- any change in its appearance is due entirely to the brushes. And it doesn't need to be said that each brush is applied on a new layer, right? I thought not.



The first brush I made, and the one I play with the most, is the straight folds shadows brush.



Nifty, huh? I set it to multiply, then added the straight folds highlights brush overtop. I set that to overlay, and reduced the opacity so the shine didn't blind me.



I decided I wanted deeper shadows, so I duplicated the shadow layer.



Yay for optical illusions. :)

The next brush pair is the side folds. (I think that's the name. I may have named it something else. Oh well.) Following the same steps as above, here's what came out:







Here's the sweeping folds brush pair.







Stay tuned for part 2, where we take a single fold and do all kinds of stuff to it.