------------------------------------------------------------
"Making wood textures."
------------------------------------------------------------

By a request from Lowell, This tutorial will show you how to make wood textures in Photoshop CS and applying it to a model in Maya. It's a good idea to plan what you're aiming to use this for, Game/Real time, or Cinematic. In this tutorial, I'm going for Game. This means i am going to paint in shadows and stuff, unless the engine supports lighting.

I start by creating some awesome geometry ( create / polygon primitive / cube). scale (R) and adjust as needed.

Next. Automatic wrap it. Quick and easy ( polygon UVs / Automatic Mapping). In your UV Texture Editor, you can view it's UVs and stuff. You can further adjust the size and layout here.( window / UV Texture Editor).

Bring your UVs into Photoshop via UV Snapshot (In the UV Texture window: polygons / UV Snapshot). Here specify a size & pick a destination for your UVs. As well as file format. Those are my settings ^ .

Start by getting your UV lines on it's own layer (Invert image, copy, fill BG with white, delete alpha channel, load channel as selection, delete, lock layer, and finally fill with black :P ) You can view my other tutorial about this process. Has screens and everything there :3.

I Created a few new layers and grouped them. I painted the sides of the plank with a 20% black brush (B) and the tops with 40% black.

Back to Maya. I create a new Lambert ( create / materials / lambert).

You can right-click a shader and "Graph Network" to show the shader's hierarchy. On the shader's Color attribute. Click the checker button & map a file. Now you can assign a texture map to the shader. Assign the Lambert to the geometry by middle-click-drag the shader to the geometry.

To see the texture 100% (aka with out any shading or anything), In the viewport click Lighting / Use No Lights. This tells Maya to use no lights (aka 100% Lighting in other packages). Same effect can be achieved when rendering if you create an ambient light and set it's Ambient Shade to 0. Well, that's the general set-up I use when texturing. Now, more Photoshop.

Make a new document about 1024x1024( CTRL + N ). This way we can resize it and stuff. fill the entire document with the fiber filter. Adjust as needed. ( filter / render / fibers ).

Here's a bit of a jump. I've first filled the Background layer to a woodish, brown color. Drag/move (V) the fibers onto you're other document. I've scaled the fibers down a bit and threw it on it's own layer. I've copied part of the fibers and rotated (CTRL + T) 90 degrees for the top of the the plank. Set that layer's Blending Mode to "Soft Light" and it's opacity to about 50%. This will blend that fiber filter nicely with our base color. On a side note... If you think your fiber layer is a bit blurred, you can sharpen it a bit. (filter / sharpen / sharpen).

Next, I made a few more layers (The Bevel group, B- for Blacks & dark areas; and W- for whites & hilites layers). Started by tracing the UV's with the Line Tool. By default, it's in the mask drawing mode thing. Change the option by clicking the 'good' button. These lines are 50% white in my "W" layer. Once drawn, blur them a bit. (filter / blur / blur more). Lastly, set the "W" layer's blending mode to Overlay. If all's right, it should look like the screenshot above.

To give the wood some variation, Create a new document (mines 1024). Go to the document's channels fill apply a cloud (filter / render / clouds) to each channel (Red, Green, Blue). You should have a rainbowish document now :P Same as the fibers, move/drag (V) this onto our other document. I placed it in the Tex group. I change it's Blending Mode to "Exclusion" at about 28%.

Next, in the "B" layer. I started drawing black blotches & holes in the wood. Once done, CTRL select the "B" layer's thumbnail. What this does is select all the pixels in that layer.

I've created a new layer (shift +ctrl + n) and stroked it with an outside, 2px white. (Edit / Stroke). Next, With the marquee tool (M), right-click and "Select Inverse", and apply a blur to the stroke.

I change the new stroked layer's ("Layer 1") blending mode to Overlay. change it's opacity as desire, then merged with the other whites ("W") (Merge layer down: CTRL + e). With all that tweaking, you should come up with that ^.

Add details n such for finishing touches :P Here's I've added a logo (Multipied a black & white image and tweaked opacity) along with nails. (little grey circle, with a bevel effect). and viola. Done. :3

Screenshot of in Maya & a rendered shot. That about concludes this tutorial. You can see the layers & stuff I've used in this .psd file. Enjoy :P Back to top of page.