Applying a Wood texture to a material

To my disgrace I have spent several hours now trying to figure out how to simply apply a wood texture type to a material. I’ve watched several tutorials about how to import a custom image of wood grains as a texture, but i cant seem to figure out how to set the default wood grain texture as my material’s texture. I found an old 2.4 tutorial about it here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Tutorials/Materials/BSoD/part1e

I cant seem to save the texture onto my material. Can someone please explain it to me step by step?

-Azimuth

Cycles or blender internal?

This looks like the old 2.49 BSOD material tut which was for Blender

so are you on Bl or cycles ?

happy bl

I would prefer Cycles. That’s what I’ve been working in for most other things.

can you show what textures you need ?
color nor bump map ?
or only procedural textures ?

happy cl

Actually, not an answer but I also had similar problems and maybe answer would help both of us.
I was able to do this picture frame with blender render and it looks pretty good (in my eyes only) but if I switch to cycles render, I cannot figure out how to get the same stuff to apply. I did the frame with just a simply wood image and then upped the Geometry: Norm to .1 to get some texture. Am I missing something silly to apply the same in cycles? I am totally a blender newb but have also looked and looked around for the answer but have yet to see the errors of my ways.
I have attached examples of both ways. Thanks in advance.
CyclesRender


BlenderRender

abow

Thanks. I finally managed to figure it out and it looks great!

My new log cross section table http://imgur.com/4kyrnJX