Creating Log Beams with Random Knots and flat spots

[Taholmes160]

HI Folks:

I am working on a log home project that will feature some significant log work. Logs in this type of a situation tend to be hand stripped and have some random flat spots as well as knots that tend to have some raised bumps associated with them. heres an example picture

Is there a way to create these logs more or less automatically? I’d like to use them without having to hand model each one individually

Thanks
TIM

[burnin]

those are simply “Timber” cylinders

Timber - A Realistic Procedural PBR Wood Material (Download links included)

[ballPresFinalThumb] Timber is a fully procedural, realistic, PBR material made with Blender’s shader nodes A lot of people seemed to enjoy Wickr (Thank you so much!) so I thought it was time to make something that would actually be useful. I’m an Interior Design student and I’m interested in becoming an architectural illustrator / renderer so I thought I should have a go at making some wood. I’m always coming up against issues with not having exactly the right wood image textures for a scene …

[Taholmes160]

Hey Burnin:

Thanks for the great suggestion – the timber shader is a fantastic bit of work, I do have a couple questions/problems

1. Timber (either version) is very demanding of resources and causes repeated crashes of blender 2.81 with no error being seen in the terminal

2. Timber seems to be constructed to create boards or herringbone pattern, not what I need for beams (this may be a setting thing)

3. In what little fiddling I’ve been able to do around crashes, it seems to not be properly creating the knots and associated displacement of the mesh – can you give me some pointers to get this working right?

Thanks a bunch
TIM

[burnin]

1. Depends on your system specs. On mine works perfectly fine.
   ie.
   

   

2. It’s just a node group, a preset. Dive deep in, to fiddle in detail.

3. Can’t give no other pointers than - think good - know your system, know your work & abilities. If impatient & unsure, learn, make mistakes, gain experience or read the above linked thread twice before performing action

[Gemn (Erindale Woodford)]

Blender’s been changing a lot with procedural nodes. I will be doing an updated version of Timber to take this into account but probably not before 2.82? It’s looking like 2.81 to 2.82 is another jump for the nodes. If you are struggling to use it in 2.81 it might be a case of diving into the node groups and making sure that the standard textures (noise etc) are using the correct 2.81+ versions and any mapping nodes that might be in there are using the new versions. Beyond that I just apologise for the inconvenience and I’ll do an update in the future once the node updates calm down a little!

[SterlingRoth]

I would recommend sculpting one log and baking that to displacement textures

Taking the time to make it seamless will make your job much easier.

Those procedural woodgrain setups are nice, but they are indeed heavy shaders. I think baked textures would be the way to go.