I am trying to build a fast and easy to adjust procedural wood texture for my students.
I looked into many advanced shaders but the math nodes there are just beyond the scope.
Most artists I would argue dont even understand whats going on there - besides the creators.
For me it seems that the Wave texture in Cycles lacks a very important feature: Saw.
This one is often really needed and cannot be build by a simple Color Ramp node like you can see below:
So somebody has an idea how to simply create something like the Saw with a minimum steps in a Cycles material?
I also found this old Blender internal tutorial which is interesting because it seems to do something similar with the Color Ramp building a Ring texture with the Saw effect:
One way to get a saw tooth effect is to use the math modulo function on {for example} the texture coordinate.
The modulo {followed by a divide} creates a value that ranges from 0 to 1 and then back to 0
The saw tooth!
The mapping node to distorts the frequency in each dimension, stretching the Z for the texture along the object
The object XYZ coordinates are added to some noise to add waviness and make the borders irregular
The dot product node is to convert the XYZ coordinate into a value to apply the function
I gave your idea a test drive and noticed that one crucial function from the wave node I am unable to rebuild.
The wave node has an ability to well basically dot the surface and then stretch it faking pores.
Any idea how this could be done? I studied the node set-up but don’t claim that I get it.
Ideally the black and white values in the ramp I would like to give a texture or distort.
Thanks for pointing to this wood tutorial. After some slight modifications cycles version of it looks quite good imho. It was a matter of changing 3 texture nodes and some slight scaling issues. Added little randomness to the material so that it is different on each copied object. What is missing are knots however this would probably double complexity of the nodes.
Michel aka Varkenvarken has this covered using OSL but this is slow to render.
To the last question how to introduce pores along stretched ring texture - what if you XYZ separate coordinates and add noise to stretched
X and Z components, then combine XYZ. Use same noise to modulate colors after the Ramps using additional Color mix nodes? Just an idea, need to check on that.
I think that eppo is on the right track.
All I needed to do was add another noise texture that has a much higher scale.
This noise texture is added to distort the X and Z coordinate of the texture in much the same way as the distortion on the wave texture
I found this also interesting - adding a noise function into the scale and detail scale input for the wave node.
The far right now looks much better than the middle one which is a basic wave node approach.
Bartek’s wood nodes file was posted somewhere on the Forum if i recall it right… His use of RGB curve to tone down contrast differences was really a find.
All presentation was a joy to watch actually. #12 has a bit too much going on the vertical sides imho. Depends on a wood sort, but outer layers usually have less contrast for the ones i know here.
I tried to google and find it but no luck. I am not sure if you mean something different because at the cgcockie site they have this as a paid tutorial
I’m pretty sure i saw file for grabs a while after the BCON - less than month or so. I’m certainly not thinking paid subscriptions. I’m almost sure this was here on forum …
I trust you - I just was personally not able to find anything through the search function here and in Google. Maybe he uses a different user name here?
