realistic wood without photosource

PolyHertz

This is something I've been wondering a while, what methods would anyone here recommend to create believable wood (like with peeling paint, rotted, etc.) without relying on photo sources? painting, sculpting, etc., anythings fair game on the subject as long as photo manipulation/overlays arn't involved.

Mark Dygert

WoodWorkshop does a decent job of creating different kinds of wood, it even tiles. So does FilterForge but isn't free and sifting through the filters can be maddening. They should only be uses as a base to start painting on.

Tiles can be handy if you have a object that is uniquely unwrapped. You apply the tile to a second UV channel planar map it, then bake the second channel to the first. All of a sudden the countless hours you would normally spend trying to line up wood grain across seams, disappears.

MoP

Is there any reason why you would want to make realistic wood textures without using reference of real wood? Sounds like a strange request. Reference is a must if you want to make realistic quality textures.

PolyHertz

Vig: Thanks, hadn't heard of woodWorkshop before, will have to look into that.

Mop: Figured someone would ask that. Photo sourceing is very useful for a lot of things, but it can be somewhat constricting too. Essentially I want to best be able to use photos as aids instead of a crutch, and to do that Its necessary to be able to create a quality foundation without them.

SHEPEIRO

ive sculpted a fair bit of wood i tend to make the brushes from photosource, heavily modified though.

need a plain grain, a couple of ends, a couple of knots, and a "split" brush.

and by heavily modified i mean i use a mix of crazybumps shape recognition, photoshops layer effects (precise glows are amazing), and its smart blur are good for exagerating the shapes within the original source.

also finding good source images that are overly "woody" helps

Ryno

Almost all of my textures are a combination of hand-painting and photos. Sometimes photos are used as texture base, or simply overlays, or sometimes I throw a photo in a temporary alpha channel and use it to get random selections. Often times I use completely unrelated source photos to get things looking right. (Instead of a wood texture, use a concrete for overlay to get irregularity.)

What kind of wood are you talking about? Tree bark? Pristinely cut 2x4s? Aged and rotting railroad ties?

There's no exact formula except to know what kind of wood you want and to start painting. Use overlays that suit the surface type and aid in defining the types of irregularities that you want. Noise and motion blur to get started on the grain. Paint the other specifics.

Kawe

Since we are talking about procedural stuff you might wanna check out MapZone which I believe is free.

http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

Mechadus

In the arch-viz world, wood is my least favorite thing in the world

I like to mess around with Lightwaves procedural nodes - usually Ill mix a couple marble maps being fed by gradient ramps for the colors, then throw a dent map and a noise map over the top. Once I get it looking close, I can then just render out as big of a section as I want (Because unlike MAX, Lightwaves procedural textures are actually seamless) and then adjust the colors in PS, and then generate the normals and such from there.

00Zero

hmm. well, i dont really sculpt wood. im usually not that anal about it. for the wood in our hook scene we used photosource (modified of course). the only thing I sculpted in zbrush was the ends of the planks and i also flattened some of the edges so it catches the light in the normal map and makes it look more worn.

so pretty much i zbrush major (kinda) forms in the wood planks and then i just apply normals for the rest with a normal map tool or something.

ArtsyFartsy

If you haven't tried it yet, my trick is to scan wooden objects. Wood maintains it's surface quality down to a microscopic level, and if you do a high res scan (600+dpi) you can get a great texture as a base for further processing in photoshop.

You can try it out with anything, kitchen cutting boards, wooden spoons. You don't know what you'll find until you magnify it 50 times.

Other than that, if you want a purist approach, the usual photoshop tools will work. When you make wood from scratch I find it very difficult to make non-brown colored wood. Like say a table made of wood that was painted green. It's very hard to get it to look right without using photosource because it's very time consuming to draw all the subtle color attenuation.

Ryno

For paint, I use a photo of concrete or something similar as a mask. Or use it to grab random selections, then just paint them in.

PolyHertz

Thanks everyone for the input

I'll be trying out these different methods to see what gets the closest to the results I'm looking for. Though can't promise I'll be posting everyones favorite barrels/crates in the 'working on' thread, despite how much I know everyone likes seeing those