Tiny fibers

electricsauce

I'm trying to get the look of tiny fibers in a rope substance that I'm working on. What's the best approach for this? My attempts so far have just resulted in making the texture look muddier.

Quack!

Those kinds of details are going to need an uber high resolution texture, try 4k.  With that said, you normally would not dedicated a super high res image to something like that, so you would need to zoom so the texture tiles far less and then the detail can be represented with the pixels you have.

Twister3

I created a similar rope for my Prince of Persia environment. I created a heightmap and used tesselation in-engine. Here you can have a look at the textures (scroll down). The fibers certainly could be improved but it was enough for the purpose of the environment.

cptSwing

a detail normal map applied in the shader, possibly?