How is Apple's fabric texture generated?

Question

Apple uses this texture in a lot of its products now:

And here's a closer look:

You can see that it's not just a bunch of lines: there's an element of randomness to it. Generally speaking, how can this be accomplished? I'm not interested so much in the implementation as I am in the concept. I've looked online, but couldn't find any hints. If the concept is too broad to be fully covered here, I'd be very happy with some reading material.

Answer 1

The techniques that you should look into are called texture synthesis and procedural texture generation. In the literature there are many algorithms that can generate a randomly but realistically looking texture based on a sample texture (e.g., a photo of a rock, marble or other material) or based on input parameters (amount of randomness, structure of the texture, et cetera). Some algorithms are pretty amazing in what they can accomplish.