You can appreciate the thickness from the top having different stripes with two contrasting type of wood.
I am trying to do it procedural. I am really new to nodes and I usually struggle. So far the best I found to re-create the stripes is the wave texture.
Question 1
But as you can see the stripes have a slight blur between them which make the masking a little bit UN-realistic. The change of wood should be abrupt, therefore I am wondering how to make the stripes to not transition with a gradient.
Question 2
The second problem I have is that the black lines are thinner…and in plywood I believe the sheets of wood are the same thickness. So I am also looking for having even thickness on the stripes whereas is black or white.
Question 3
There is also a detail in plywood: The different sheets are not just color dark or white…but there are more variations. Is it possible to have the stripes black, white and some other greys randomly arranged…so they are not exactly the same value but they have a slight change.
If anyone has some experience with nodes and procedural textures…Judging by what I have seen in internet…this should be possible to achieve in Blender with procedural nodes.
I think that what I’d do here is to texture the sides of the board with something like the texture that you’ve shown in the first photo – or maybe even rougher, because there are only so-many layers – and then use a different wood-like texture for the top and bottom faces. And call it good …
@Blendereruser worked great with your suggestion. Do you know if I can mask the sides of my mesh in some way to not get affected by the stripes? If I could paint them black in a way. Cause now the plywood effect is going all dirrections.
I agree with @sundialsvc4 in that simply creating a new material for the top and bottom faces is probably the fastest way.
If you really wanna do it in one material and stick to simple geometries like in your image you might get away with masking the sides based on their normal.
Setting up mask with Normals
Take the Normals output from the Texture Coordinates and plug it into a Separate XYZ node. Then take the Y value (basing this off of your screenshot where the flat faces are perpendicular to the Y axis), plug it into a Math node set to Absolute and then use another Math Node set to Less Than and set the threshold to something close to 0 like 0.01. For this geometry it would create a mask that is black on the two big faces and white on the sides.
You should get it to work with lightly bent surfaces as well by playing with the threshold to adjust the range of the mask.
You can multiply this mask with you Wave Texture or use it as factor for a mix node.
I used something like that a while back, when playing with a plywood material myself. I was just starting to grasp nodes and the setup is a complete mess (there are redundancies and a lot of stuff dragging the performance down to the point that it crashes Eevee half the time), which is why I was hesitant to post it.
But I think it got some stuff about the texture right, like the dark and light layers flipping on the corners, so here it is, in case you wanna take a look:
Noel, wanted to thank you for such a great material! I’ve been playing with this to great effect. I had a question for you, I am working to beef up the realism of the material you provided and am looking for some pointers on how to add one more feature. Your awesome material alternates between colors on every layer, one color to another. This is perfect as this is how plywood appears IRL. I would also like to bake in color variations horizontally into each layer to achieve something closer to the variations illustrated in the second photo. I am a real novice to blender, my rookie thought is to create two “levers”. The first is a broader color shift of less contrast randomly along one layer. The other is a tighter color shift of higher contrast to create knots, both randomly placed among the layers as pictured.
I’m coming to you because I have literally no idea where to start as I have almost 0 understanding of how this material is actually calculating and am just learning as I go! Thanks for making this.
Hi there,
Just to add a little something, there are many solutions, I share a simple and a bit more complex procedural solution here.
You can use a simple brick texture that has random colours, you can control them if you like, then set the mortar, and mix it with the chipwood textures, and colour it:
Another solution is to create a coordinate system, with a white noise set to 4D to get random seeds for colours. You can control the shades with a map range, then you could again mix that with the wood pattern, and then colour it. The Colour Burn (set to full black) controls the black thickness, while the Dodge (set to full white) controls the possible falloff of the coloured borders (should you need it for some reason):
There can be other solutions of course but these should work pretty well, if you mix it with textures for the even wood and the chipwood parts.
Since there are shades, you can mask your textures directly from the white noise, e.g. set a greater then node, and multiply your textures into that, then add them back altogether.
PS: make sure to rather have the object origin at the center of the volume, it matters in most cases, like for the coordinate system setup to work
