the image above is a photograph taken by a wikipedia author in the royal ontario museum. the textile with its rich brocade ornaments was made in lyon in 1785. i downloaded the image in its highest resolution and fed it into a 3D software. it serves as a texture for the colour, the shinyness and hight mapping of a standard 3D plane.
all three components – the colour, the reflectiveness and the displacement – work together to create a look which shows detail the original probably does not have. below are two such renderings.