Illuminated Cloth MDL Material

I'm excited to share my entry for Allegorithmic's Materialize contest that earned me an honorable mention, which was a great recognition of my work.

I was on the hunt for something unique and was fortunate to discover a material that proved to be incredibly interesting to develop. It's an illuminated cloth material crafted from specially fabricated optical fiber wires. Normally, light shouldn't escape from optical fibers, but for this "cloth," numerous laser cuts are intentionally made at random spots. This allows the light to leak out along the length of each wire, creating a truly unique appearance.

The material is designed as an MDL material driven by a Substance graph and rendered using IRay with displacement mapping. Essentially, it consists of an array of translucent spherical optical glass fibers that form the "cloth." Rendering this material was quite a challenge, as it involves a lot of glass with multiple refractions and light bounces, along with an emission effect.