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Poly is a new web-based AI-driven texture generator. It is a text-to-image AI that will produce a material based on a prompt and an available Style preset. It needs about 30 seconds to generate a texture. The result will be previewed on a 3D sphere object along with the corresponding Ambient Occlusion, Albedo, Normal, Roughness and Height maps ! You can use Poly to upload and edit your own images and make them Seamless, Upscale them or even produce Normal, Height, Roughness and AO maps using AI. The app is free to use but the subscription plan lets you choose more styles and unbounds you from the maximum 2K resolution to up to 8K.

I'm in a project trying to recreate a realsitic look and started experimenting with bokehmaps to minmic the subtle abberation of an imperfect lens. You can buy sets of these images. But I came across this tutorial by YellowDog where he shows a rig in AE to generate them yourself. I followed the tutorial and made the rig in AE and generated some images. You can find the rig and images underneath. Perhaps you find them useful. It's easy to add and adjust the layers to taste. Philip bokeh generator.zip

Here is my solution, it took no more than 5 minutes. 100% procedural, plus a bump map for the small wrinkles, it can still be tuned with a few more minutes of work to get better results.

I use icons above the object manager. I recommend you too, it's faster than with the menu under the second mouse button. Screenshot below. But still some icons are missing and the "fold selected" and "unfold selected" commands are universal whistles instead of proper icons.

The answer is always, it depends how close youre going to get. it depends how well lit the shot will be, it depends what res youre rendering to. For a generic object in a room, I would take a gradient, set it to circular, then throw in a ton of random greyscale values to make random concentric rings. then either bump, material displace, or displace deformer. Then smush it a bit with an ffd for the imperfections. Then final noise bump over the top for undulations

This is so painful to watch. It's like watching monkeys typing Shakespeare. In the time that it took him to "hope" it would work he could have just opened the SDK and read the documentation for tasks this trivial. Oh Jesus, kill me now.

First, make sure the label image is the correct ratio of height vs width to fit the polygon selection. In case you didn't know, use the formula: Diameter x π (pi) to get the length around the roll and simply look at the width of the selected polys for the width. If your label image matches the ratio, all you need to do is set the material tag Projection to Cylindrical, activate Texture Mode & Enable Axis to see the orientation of the cylindrical projection cage. Rotate it to match the orientation of the model, then right-click the material tag and select 'Fit to Object'. Since the label polys are not disconnected, the cage will fit the entire model, but then you just use the Scale tool to squish it to fit the label polys. Disable 'Texture Mode' and 'Enable Axis'. Let me know if you need some visual guides for this.

Unless it has to unroll in an animation, or the camera is literally inches away from it in a still shot, that is the sort of model that is best done mainly with textures I'd say. So you need to model a main cylinder (with enough geo to support hi res displacement on the ends) and possibly the label, but arguably even that could be done with textures ! Once you have your cylinder you would UV unwrap it into 3 islands, the ends and the main wrap, and then use displacement maps you have previously made using photos of the actual object to get the wrinkles in the flat bit and the concentric patterns on the ends. The other approach is to model it manually, which certainly can be done if you are prepared to spend some time wrangling splines. If I had to model this I would get a photo of one end (front-on) and make a spline that described the unique shape of the spirals in that end, then I would get a copy of that and use them both in a Loft object under cloth thickness to get the whole length of the object. Displacer deformers, possibly in a planar mode, would then get you the rest of the way. Wrinkling would still be done with textures, or via the smoothing deformer / magnet technique. Here's a very rough one I threw together to demonstrate the general principal... CBR