My goal is to create (several species) high-quality wood procedural textures. I want them to have a rich sense of the wood, much like the textures in photographs. I’ve found this might take a long time to develop.
A few days ago, I browsed several photos of wood surfaces online. They have open-pore… perhaps the finish was done without filling pores(I’m not a woodworker, but I bought a book by Bob Flexner “Understanding Wood Finish”). I impulsively wanted to mimic it:
Then, the material I created seemed to have some realism when used on a small toy airplane, while the material on a large area of wood strips (0.5m x 0.5m x 2m) looked completely different.
This kind of material looks like old and worn wood, like what I would expect to see on a 100 year old piece of furniture.
The way you have done it works really well at a small scale and looks super realistic on the toy plane. But for the large wood beams, you would need some larger scale detail to get the same feel.
A few ideas:
Add some large stains and scratches that add variation across a large surface. Make stains that affect both the colors and roughness. You can see those stains and variations on the doors and chairs in the background of your render.
Are the larger wood patterns part of the bump, or just the micro details? Maybe making the large wood rings slightly present in the bump would make this look better at a large scale?
This kind of worn wood would probably look better on a slightly beveled and warped piece of wood rather than a perfect cube. The mesh itself matters for this.
The varnish would probably be a bit worn or at least less thick and saturated on the corners and sharp edges of a cube.
But how to apply it to the colored texture is a problem. I found that several methods I tried didn’t looking good. I tried for another two or three hours yesterday… just randomly combined things. Here’s the result:
I still haven’t captured the essence of the large-scale wood color pattern. I believe I haven’t tried enough, or perhaps I know too little. one of the difficulties is that I’m afraid of ruining the already well-done fiber details, so It is restricted when making modifications.
Yes, I originally only used fiber pore bumps; this time I added wood ring bumps, but I don’t feel very confident about it.
P.S.
Actually, this is just a personal goal of mine, and I realize that posting it here might not be right. I could spend a lot of time (without a dead line) refining these materials. I really want to achieve a good and more realistic result with these wood materials.
If you want to improve it, I think observing the reference is the best source of ideas.
I think at the moment the fine/high frequency detail is good, but bigger/low frequency detail does not exist in this
Have a look at “frequency separation” photo editing technique. Not that it would be relevant in this at all, but just the idea of seeing and working with detail in different frequencies. You can see lower frequency detail in reference by simply blurring it:
The image has uneven lighting, but you can also see the weird subtle low frequency patterns in color and tones, especially on the left side. Those are quite difficult to reproduce complex organic patterns subtle and random in all kinds of ways, but that’s what we are used to seeing on wood apparently and without them it looks off. I don’t have a solution how to replicate them, but I think that’s the problem to solve if you want to make realistic procedural wood and that would explain why larger pieces of your texture may not look as good as smaller ones.
I saw your procedural wood materials before, and it looked quite good.
Thank you. This sounds a good way to reference colors, too. I just tried it (although the range of those photos wasn’t large enough). Hmm… I still don’t quite grasp the pattern. And I agree with you that it’s quite difficult to reproduce these patterns, but it is an important part.
Yeah, finding good reference is often a challenge.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Me neither! And they are all different for every single kind of wood as well. I just gave up on those in procedural part and just add them from other textures or photos. Or should I say used to add, I haven’t made procedural wood in a while now…
Don’t forget that some variation may not come from inside the wood, but only be on the surface if it gets there when processing the wood. I think sometimes there are various patterns just on the surface as well, so 2d noises… In addition to what may be going on here.
And they are all different for every single kind of wood as well.