To create the folds in our cloth, we're going to use KPT6 Materializer. Materializer applies bump maps to images and those bump maps can be used to create the kind of distortions we need for slightly rippled cloth.

• Make sure you do not have any selection active by selecting Select > Deselect, or pressing Ctrl/Cmd + D.

Materializer will only ripple the edges of the rectangle if it is not selected. If there is a selection active, it will only work inside that selection.

• Open KPT6 Materializer.

At this point you could just load the Cloth Basics preset that accompanies this tutorial. We'll go through the settings anyway.

The most important panels here are the Texture, 3-D Lighting, and Material Panels. The Texture panel defines what bump map will be used to create the effect, the Material Panel defines the surface properties of the result, and the 3-D Lighting panel defines how the light plays over the material result. The first thing we'll do is set up the Texture panel.

• In the Texture Panel select the 'Image' option from the Texture Map menu just beneath the preview.
• When prompted to load an image, locate the "clothbump.jpg" image that comes with the download for this tutorial.
• Set the Scale slider to '2x', the Rotate slider to 99 degrees, and the Smoothing slider to 37%.

You have now loaded a greyscale texture map that defines the bumps and dents in the surface of our material. The Scale of the map is increased to make larger folds, the Rotation is changed to make the bumps run from the top left to the bottom right, and the Smoothing slider smooths out the roughness of the bumps.

If you like, you can also change the Horizontal and Vertical Offset sliders. These control which part of the bump map you see in the material. We set ours to 79% Horizontal, 55% Vertical to get the effect we wanted.

The last two slider settings make sure that the folds in the cloth are not too deep, and that the ripples at the edges are not too severe. If the ripples look too strong in the preview, adjust the Distort Amount slider down.

Now we can add a light. Our aim here is to light up the surface enough that it's fairly bright, with areas of shadow and highlight.

• Add a new light by clicking the Add Light button at the top left of the panel.
• Set this light's sliders as follows: Light Brightness 100%. Highlight Sheen 87%. Highlight Spread 87%.
• Use the Sharp/Diffuse button to set the light's highlight to Diffuse.
• Move this light to a point around the top left of the lighting preview (see the image below).

The Sharp/Diffuse button is the bottom of the three buttons to the right of the panel. It defines whether the light should cast a sharp edged wet highlight, or a smoother highlight. In this case we want our main highlight to be smooth because cloth is a 'diffuse' surface. A material such as satin might use a sharp highlight. A light is set to diffuse when the right hand half of the button is white and the left is black.

Now press the Apply button and we'll move on to the next stage.

To spice up the image, we can add a drop shadow to the bottom cloth layer.

• Add a Layer Effect to the cloth layer, a drop shadow of 15 pixel size, 5 pixel offset, and 40% opacity).