Seeking recommendations on creating textures
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I'd be grateful if someone could point me to a site, a book or other tuition material that would teach me about creating realistic wood textures for use on furniture models.
I am a complete newbie at rendering but have been having fun playing with Kerkythea and using SU materials mainly but also some materials that I imported as textures based on photos of different woods. However they are lacking in many ways, in particular, photos of wood gleaned from the Internet are often of small pieces and they tile and scale horribly in SU (and KT) and they come with no bump maps or normal maps.
I can probably take pictures from my own woodpile to get the sizes right but the texture mapping is something else. I think the materials editor in KT will probably let me accomplish quite a bit but to be honest I am not seeking to become a great expert - just an informed user, if such a thing exists - so I have skated over the theory somewhat.
Ideally, I'd like a program that takes a photo of wood and turns it into something KT - or another renderer will use and provide decent results with. If this is a pipe dream and it's starting to seem like that, then I'd be interested in finding out the easiest way to do it from the ground up in as simple a way as possible.
Chris
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That's usually something you'd do in Photoshop (or similar software). Please see this video:
[flash=853,505:3aq2cznh]http://www.youtube.com/v/mUgU81LFbPQ&fs=1[/flash:3aq2cznh]
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Thanks d12dozr. It's not really what I had in mind although it goes partway to what I am after.
The problem with real wood grains is that they don't tile at all realistically if they have a nice figure and pictures of small pieces look awful if they are painted onto a large area (either tiled or scaled up). A related problem is that when using several instances of a single component, the repetition of the same pattern looks very artificial.
It may be that I am seeking the impossible and that one simply has to amass a large number of good quality photos of wood of large sizes and apply these to faces, sliding the textures around to a pleasing effect.
There remains the problem of ensuring that the wood has a bit of character using a bump/normal map and I am definitely stuck here although I guess that is more of a question for the KT forum than SCF (I have read the materials editor guide but am stuck before I start - it doesn't tell me how to turn a photo into a materials library that I can then edit.)
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Hi Chris,
First of all, browse through this topic where Madhaw shared a whole lot of textures. Actually, in this post he gives a link to the whole collection (the original and their seamless versions).
This does not solve all your problem of course as one would still like to be able to make good materials from existing photos (now not even speaking about bump and specular maps) but still a great collection.
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Gai,
Thank you. I have seen Madhav's textures and indeed have downloaded and used a few. The main problem with them as shown is that they lack dimensional information but are in any case of rather small pieces judging by the size of the grain patterns.
What I am seeking - at least insofar as the "raw material" is concerned is better demonstrated by photos like the ones below. These come from a vast collection of wood images nearly all of which have dimensional information - or at least clues - provided. What I miss is the step that takes me from these images to good textures.
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Hi Chris;
I posted about this same topic for exactly the same reasons as you, over at the TWR forum. Fletch provided me with these two links:
http://www.3dtotal.com//team/Tutorials/leafproject/leaf_2.php
http://www.kerkythea.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=51724#51724
and Olishea with this one:
http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13176
From what I've learned from these, there isn't much "skating over the theory" to be done, but I have been able to make some textures that are approaching acceptable. I've been using Gimp for the photo editing and concluded I needed to learn more about that program before I'd make any more progress with textures in Twilight. Hope these are of use to you.-Brian
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Hi Brian,
Those are great links - spot on! Thank you very much. -
Chris,
Some good programs to look into that I use in my workflow are:
http://www.pixplant.com
http://www.luxology.com/imageSynth/
http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/genetica.htmOf course along with these I use Photoshop as well but these are all great programs once you learn to use them. Hope this helps.
Scott
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Scott, Modelhead,
Thank you very much - some great recommendations there. It is clear that Photoshop (or it's various cousins - I'm on a Mac and using Gimp, Pixelmator etc.) is pretty essential. I have had some success with Gimp by taking a basic board, and copying/modifying it in various ways to create larger panels. Gimp's Liquid resixe and bump maps help create some pretty good looking images that then serve fairly well for the size of furniture I am working with at the moment.
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