Wooden beams and planks without baking - Texturing / uv tip
grand marshal polycounter
Hi! I'm currently working on a scene that has some wooden props in it, and I wanted to approach it with just a tiling texture , and no baking because I thought it would look fine, and it would save me a lot of time. Also, they are just boxes. 
Some of the results:
This is the material I used on all of the wooden assets. The material also adds some color variation, random offsets on the u of the uv to add extra variation, and bending on the duplicates of the meshes...
The textures were made in Substance Designer, but the more important part is the horizontal dent lines in the normal , that gives some "edge damage" to our planks and beams to make it look a little bit less tiling, if we align the uvs nicely.
Here is an example with a crate , and the uvs of one plank. The anothers planks uvs looks the same, but they are offset horizontally or vertically to add variation. The mesh uses face weighted normals.
Result on some beams - face weighted normals
More crates:
And thats it...
I hope some of you will find this useful!
Some of the results:
This is the material I used on all of the wooden assets. The material also adds some color variation, random offsets on the u of the uv to add extra variation, and bending on the duplicates of the meshes...
The textures were made in Substance Designer, but the more important part is the horizontal dent lines in the normal , that gives some "edge damage" to our planks and beams to make it look a little bit less tiling, if we align the uvs nicely.
Here is an example with a crate , and the uvs of one plank. The anothers planks uvs looks the same, but they are offset horizontally or vertically to add variation. The mesh uses face weighted normals.
Result on some beams - face weighted normals
More crates:
And thats it...
I hope some of you will find this useful!
Replies
And this is how the material looks like. I marked the more important parts:
The top left part is the actual offset. It could be done in a couple of different ways as well, there is even one that would remove the need of separated meshes but its too much work for what I need. I could lay out the planks next to each other on the uvmap and just make a procedural idmap based on v position, in the material. But for what I need, this is good enough. The second top section adds the hue and brightness changes, and the bottom section makes the small shape changes.
More:
I would also assume it would be kinda hard to put so many at one location in a not retarded level, that it would cause you too many drawcalls for your powerful modern videocard? Maybe I'm overestimating them. Like okay you will maybe see 100 or more at once but that isn't really a big number. If I would have a huge open area with houses only built like this, then yeah I can imagine, it would hurt. I also wouldn't recommend constructing a city like that. For these props here and there, it works fine in my opinion if you can live with the drawcalls. But basically that happens any time when you copy a mesh.
Thanks for the heads up though.
EDIT: oops, yeah, I missed the part about the object position node
Another simple variation is having 2 noise masks at different large scales, that way tiling across multiple UV spaces will still have unique noise detail.