How to prepare fabric swatches for rendering

What to upload

A swatch of the fabric itself, in the Swatch slot. Renders don't read it on its own: Skip Shoot repeats it into a tile, so a crease or a shadow in the swatch is repeated across the whole sofa.

A lifestyle image of the fabric on a piece is optional. It helps renders match the fabric's sheen in real light, and nothing else in it is copied into the scene.

The ideal swatch

A picture of the cloth, not of the sample: flat, filling the frame, evenly lit and true to color.

• Flat and straight on, with no fold, curl or wrinkle.
• Filling the frame, with no memo border, card or table showing.
• Roughly square. The tile is cut square, so a long, narrow swatch loses its ends.
• At least one full pattern repeat, two if they fit.
• Soft, even light, with no lit side and shaded side.
• True color, with nothing on top: no labels, pins or fingers.

Check the repeat tile

When you save, Skip Shoot crops in from the edges of the swatch and repeats the middle in a grid, three by three unless you choose otherwise. That repeat tile, not the swatch on its own, is what renders read, so whatever the tile looks like is what you get. The tile is built from an uploaded swatch file: a swatch given only as a link renders from the plain swatch, with no tile, so upload the file.

• Open the product again after saving: the Repeat tile preview shows what renders will use.
• Visible seams, a grid or a bright cross where the copies meet mean the swatch won't tile cleanly. Try 2 × 2, which repeats least, or take the swatch again, flatter.
• If the swatch is already a wide, flat shot with several repeats in it, choose 2 × 2, so the pattern isn't shrunk further than the picture already shrinks it.

Measurements

Scale is where fabric renders most often go wrong, and one number fixes it.

• Pattern repeat, in inches: the most useful number. Renders draw the pattern at that real size and never resize it to fit the piece.
• No repeat to hand? Enter the width and height of one motif. Left blank, a motif is drawn 9 inches wide and 5 inches tall.
• Depth isn't used for fabric.
• Guess scale with AI, on the product's page, suggests these from the swatch for you to check.

Where it can go

Under More details, the pieces a fabric is offered for in Editorial are ticked for you: sofas, chairs, stools, headboards, ottomans, benches, pillows, curtains and more.

• Armchairs, sectionals, throws and cubicle dividers are left unticked. Tick them if the fabric is made for them.
• Untick anything it isn't sold for, so nobody puts it there by mistake.

Before you save

Check each swatch:

• Flat, filling the frame, roughly square.
• At least one full repeat.
• Even light, true color, nothing on top.
• Pattern repeat entered, or the size of one motif.
• JPEG, PNG or WebP, 4.5 MB or less.