Hello! I wanted to ask the community about one of my works in progess and its materials.
I’m not really good with Blender, and I really wanted to get a good material from Cycles to fit my subway entrance nicely. I don’t know why, but I keep ending up with an unappealing and boring texture, no matter how hard I try. I would like to ask for some opinions on how I might make a more realisti wood type material for the sides. Here is image I’ve been using for reference, it’s in the next post.
Let me tell you the secret of a good wooden construction: Beams and planks.
On what planet did you find your spray can to paint entire walls with a wood pattern? You should file a patent! Seriously, you must think of how to build your thing with wood and your material must show the details of the construction… Beams and planks. Otherwise, you get a very unnatural (and boring) pattern.
To work with a tileable pattern, your mesh must also show hints of the construction because you will unwrap beams and planks. Here is the example of a part of my wooden thingy:
I created temporary materials to separate the beams and the planks according to their orientation. Here, it’s simple: Horizontal or vertical. But in all cases, you must think of the grain of the wood. Planks and beams always have their longest dimension in the same direction than the wood grain. I used different materials to be able to select and unwrap each of them separately. I used Cylindrical Projection for the beams and Smart Unwrap for the rest. Luckily, Smart Unwrap automatically aligned all my planks vertically. All I had to was to resize a bit so that the planks which have similar dimensions cover a similar area on the UV map. (Well, no need to be super-precise here. Wood doesn’t come out from a factory managed by the NASA.)
Once you’ve done all this, it will look better than on your image but you’re not finished yet. Wood isn’t molten plastic. You need a bump map and a specular map. You can create them outside of Blender from your wooden pattern but I find it more convenient to create them on the fly in the node tree. No need to go back and forth from Blender to your paint software to make changes. That’s what I did for my wooden thingy. I started from a B&W wood pattern which once colorized is used for the diffuse and gloss colors. The greyscale version is used as factor for the bump and the gloss. A few math nodes to control the power of all the effects… and that’s it!
My wood pattern is packed in the blend file. (Do what you want with it, CC0 and all, it’s mine.) It looks like Blender 2.64+ has no problem with packed PNG any more. If not, unpack the texture in the UV editor. Enjoy!
Thank you Powfly, I’ve checked Blender cookie, but Blender Guru seems interesting! I really appreciate it!
To Kaluura, thank you so much! I felt like I was missing something obvious! I really want to thank you for the help, it makes so much more sense now! For the bump mapping and such, I was not entirely sure. I thought that since wood is painted and sanded and such that it would not have any texturing, but its seems the more I say that, the less it actually sounds right. Thanks to both of you for the help!
Also, I was wondering, would it be easier to separate my mesh into individual objects or to just make different UV maps for the same object but different vertex groups?
Seriously, you must think of how to build your thing with wood and your material must show the details of the construction… Beams and planks. Otherwise, you get a very unnatural (and boring) pattern.