realistic wood materials - shader - your help?

[scostumatu]

Hi

 

For me, one of the most challenging materials to make look realistic is wood... in particular exterior wood for housing facades.

I like to think im pretty good at vray materials and with all my wood materials i use a mix of diffuse maps/reflect maps/ref. glosiness and bump maps... i usually make a desaturated and lightened map for the bum[p and copy that to the ref. glosiness and a darker desaturated map for the reflect map. This always gives me good results with most of my other shaders. However with wood, it seems as though no matter how hard i try, it never looks 'realistic'...

 

Does anyone have any pointers on what to do or any references of where i can get on track?

 

much appreciated.

[Chris MacDonald]

I invariably use the Floor Generator script to create wood cladding/siding, it means that you don't really need to fuss too much with bump maps (other than something subtle for close-ups) due to the boards & gaps being physically modelled. One thing I would say is once you've got the correct colour wood, spend some time tweaking your reflectivity/specular maps to get it looking really spot on - they are what make or break wood shaders imho.

 

Using the Floor Generator script in conjunction with the "multi texture" plugin/map will also stop you from having texture tiling, as different bitmaps are assigned to different planks of wood. It really has been the best way I've found to do it.

Edited February 5, 2013 by Macker