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Wood Texturing
This tutorial will require intermediate skills and knowledge of Lightwave and Photoshop.
Setup
So you have been given the task of creating a specific looking wood texture whatever you are working on. For the purpose of this tutorial, you have to surface a wooden barrel. First we have to go ahead and setup our UV's, for the barrel I created, we do not see the inside, so I'm not worrying about that too much. The way I setup my UV was first to create a morph target of the barrel and lay it out flat as seen in figure 1. Then I shot a planar UV down the Y. Now that our UV is set, I like to stretch the UV a little bit to get better proportions, just a personal preference.
 (figure 1)
Go ahead and run UV Imaginator on it, I'm going to export my image at 1500, I really don't need it this high, but for the tutorial we'll do it.
(figure 2)
Creating your base color channel in Photoshop
Open up Photoshop, this is where the real fun begins! I highly recommend using a graphics tablet for detailed texture work, I can't stress the ease of use and speed increase with having one.
So back to our task, you have been given the task of creating wood that has a certain look(specific color, look and feel) to it, but all you have is an image of wood that looks like figure 3. How do we do this? Simple, create a new blank layer in PS, name it "wood color" fill it with whatever color you'd like and set its layer properties to "multiply". See figure 4. Now we have our specific color, we're off to a good start and have only been working a couple of minutes.
(figure 3)
(figure 4)
Your director says, I want aged looking wood with paint on it that is scratched and faded and............. Wood tends to age under the sun, it becomes darker, richer. I grew up in a house with wooden walls, it aged except the areas not touched by sunlight (i.e. photos on the walls). The areas not hit by the sun still look as fresh as the day they were nailed to the wall. I wanted to have area's on my barrel that looked like they had symbols painted on them a while ago, but were scratched scuffed and faded. You guessed it, the areas of wood behind the scratched paint had to have varying layers of age in the wood.
So, lets make a symbol in a new layer in whatever color paint you'd like (call the layer "symbol paint"), then copy that layer into a new layer(call the copied layer "symbol fresh" and hide it for now. See figure 5. A good way to get a good paint look is to take your magic wand tool, select your symbol and create a new layer(hide your original layer or delete it, make sure your new layer gets called "symbol paint"). Take an interesting brush tool, in my case I like the scattered brush set to wet edges and texture and run some brush strokes through your selected area. Then deselect the area, select the eraser tool and use the scatter brush to scuff up your symbol. When your happy with how it looks, go ahead and unhide the layer "symbol fresh" that we copied before. At this point to create a good fresh look to the wood you need to make the symbol in this layer a much lighter color preferably almost white, then set the layer to overlay. Then take layer "symbol paint" and hide it so you can see what layer "symbol fresh" is doing with overlay set. See how it makes the wood look fresh, this is exactly what we were looking for it to do. Now, unhide layer "symbol paint", select layer "symbol fresh" and using your eraser tool again, erase from your fresh layer to get varying levels of aging. See figure 6. Cool, right?
(figure 5)
(figure 6)
We can take this even a step further, want a water stain or maybe even a blood stain? Lets make a water stain, use your color picker to select a darker hue from the wood. Create a new layer and call it "water stain", then paint some water stains using a light opacity brush. Set the layer properties to darken and now we have a nice water stain. See figure 7.
(figure 7)
Diffuse, Specularity, Glossiness and Bump.
Create a grayscale image of your color texture that you just worked on. See figure 8. The Diffuse, Specularity, Glossiness and bump channel use the grayscale information. You’ll want to tweak the grayscale image depending on how much you want your grayscale image to affect each of these channels. You may even want to create a different contrasted grayscale image for each. For my barrel I wanted it to be slightly old, but not very old. I created a grayscale image and tweaked it slightly and used for all channels.
(figure 8)
My settings for each:
Diffuse 100% | layer opacity 10%
Specularity 0% | Layer opacity 15%
Glossiness 0% | Layer opacity 5%
Bump 100% | Layer opacity 100% | Texture amplitude 1
Getting the feel for it now? Go ahead and do things like make scrap layers to beat your wood up depending on the age or the conditions its been in. The way I like to texture anything, whether it be a wooden barrel or a beaten up military vehicle is to paint and layer it like it would be in real life. In a military vehicle you would have metal, maybe a primer layer, then paint, etc.....
(End Result)
Questions? Email doug at douglaslbrown.com
Doug Brown hails from New Hampshire and is currently looking for work in the 3D industry as a generalist or specifically texturing/lighting. You can find more of his work at www.DouglasLBrown.com.
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