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


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 [Tens de ter uma conta e sessão iniciada para poderes visualizar este link] ]