[Fabric] Canvas Textures

Canvas is a plain weave with a heavy, irregular yarn, and the irregularity is the whole material. Every thread varies slightly in thickness along its length, so the over-under grid is never perfectly square and never perfectly even. A generated checkerboard weave gets the structure right and the life wrong, and the result reads as graph paper. Canvas also sits in an unusual place optically: the fibres are thick enough to catch a rim of light along each thread crossing, but matte enough that the surface never shines. These tiles are photographed from cotton duck, primed artist canvas, waxed proofed cloth and heavily used tarpaulin.

License

Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required. Commercial games, film, broadcast, print, product design and client work are all permitted. No credit, no backlink, no permission request needed. You may not resell or redistribute the texture files themselves as a texture pack.

What's in this collection

• Raw cotton duck — unbleached natural weave with visible slubs and a warm off-white cast. Tote bags, workwear, upholstery, prop sacking.
• Primed artist canvas — gesso-coated surface where the weave shows through a smooth white film. Painting surfaces, gallery scenes, print mockups.
• Waxed and proofed — oiled canvas with a slight sheen, darkened creases and water-spot marks. Field jackets, luggage, awnings, sailing gear.
• Worn tarpaulin — sun-bleached, frayed and patched heavy cloth with grommets, stitched repairs and dirt ground into the weave. Building sites, market stalls, vehicle covers, field settings.

All tiles are seamless in both directions and delivered at high resolution.

Where canvas is used

Product visualisation. Bags, shoes, luggage and workwear are largely canvas, and because these renders are usually shot close, the weave has to survive at macro distance without turning into a printed pattern.

Game environments. Tents, awnings, sacks, covered wagons and site sheeting appear across almost every setting from medieval to modern military, and canvas is one of the few materials that reads correctly in all of them.

Film and television. Digital set dressing has to match practical cloth exactly, and canvas is common enough on set that any mismatch in weave scale is immediately visible next to the real thing.

Graphic and print design. Primed canvas is the standard substrate for artwork mockups and gallery presentations, where the weave under the paint layer is what makes a flat image read as a physical object.

How to use these in Blender

1. Connect the colour map to Base Color with Metallic at 0, and use the Sheen inputs on the Principled BSDF — this is what produces the soft edge glow along fibres, and without it canvas renders like painted board.
2. Set Roughness high from the supplied map, but keep some variation; the raised thread crossings are marginally smoother than the recessed gaps and that difference carries the weave under directional light.
3. Use a Bump node at moderate strength for the weave, and reserve displacement for folds and creases handled by the mesh or a cloth simulation.
4. For backlit uses such as tents and awnings, add translucency. Canvas transmits a noticeable amount of light and a fully opaque tent under a bright sky looks wrong instantly.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on and normal, roughness and mask maps with sRGB off.
2. Use the Cloth shading model or add a fuzzy shading term so grazing angles brighten. Plain default lit makes canvas look like matte plastic sheet.
3. Drive dirt and wear with a curvature or ambient occlusion mask so grime collects in the weave valleys and along fold lines rather than sitting evenly on top.
4. Keep the UV scale honest. Canvas thread count is a real specification, and a tent with a weave scaled up to brick size is one of the fastest ways to break a scene.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Metallic at 0 and low smoothness, then add a Detail Normal Map at high tiling to keep the individual threads readable close up.
2. For flags, tents and covers, drive vertex animation from wind and let the normal map handle the weave — simulating individual threads is never worth it.
3. Assign a slightly different base tint per instance so multiple canvas objects in a scene do not all share one colour; real cloth fades unevenly.
4. Enable double-sided rendering for hanging sheets and add a translucency term, since canvas is thin enough to glow when lit from behind.

Tips for canvas specifically

Break the grid or it will look woven by machine in the wrong way. Real canvas thread thickness varies along its length, which makes the weave slightly wobbly and the tone slightly uneven across the sheet. A perfectly regular over-under pattern is the single most obvious sign of a synthetic weave, and no amount of added dirt will hide it.

Crease it permanently. Canvas holds a fold long after the fold has gone, leaving a lighter line where the fibres were compressed and a darker one where dirt collected in the valley. Painting those old crease lines into the texture instantly makes cloth read as something that has been folded, stored and reused rather than newly unrolled.

Weight it correctly in motion. Canvas is heavy and stiff, so it makes broad low-frequency folds rather than the fine ripples of silk or the sharp creases of paper. Cloth simulation defaults are usually tuned for lighter fabric, and using them on a tarpaulin makes it flutter like a bedsheet.

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Related: Leather textures, Paper textures.