Tutorials :: Texturing: Woodgrain 201

Wood Textures 201

A majority of the texture tutorials for creating wood are based on the same method: The noise and the motion blur filters. I’ve used it plenty of times myself. It’s certainly not the only way to make wood however, nor is it always the best. This tutorial adds more advanced tricks into the mix and explains a number of extra things you can do to add realism, based on a texture I actually made for a recent project. Here is the wood that we’re trying to reproduce, a heavy wood plank door.

As it is, the photo would not be a bad texture by itself, except for the glare of the camera flash. In my case, it would also look out of place next to the other textures being used in the project, which are not so photorealistic. Thus it was necessary to recreate it from scratch. Take note of some of the detail that we want to preserve in order to get the look right: the variation in grain and color among planks, the tool-marks on the surface where it was cut and the overall effects of age and wear.

To start, use the eyedropper tool to sample a light color and dark color from your source image (if you have one) as your foreground and background colors. In this case we chose a dark golden yellow and a brown. In a new file, make your first layer and fill it with either color if it’s transparent.

Instead of the old “noise” standby we’re going to start with Filters -> Render -> Fibers

Already we have something that starts to look like wood. Play with the sliders until you like the effect. In general, Variance will give the pattern a rougher appearance while Strength will increase the thickness and contrast in the grain. Click Ok when done.

This next step will be familiar to those who have made wood grain with certain other methods: from the menu, select Filter -> Liquify. Use the various brushes to warp the wood grain according to your whims; the Forward Warp tool works well for making waves and small adjustments, the Bloat and Pucker tools are good for making knots and varying the width of the grain lines. Again, keep playing until you’re satisfied with how it looks. In this care I want to keep the lines running more or less in the same direction, so the distortion was fairly subtle.

The following is an optional step but it helped me a good deal: Enter Transform mode (Ctrl-T) and stretch the wood grain beyond the edges of the canvas. Beside, obviously, changing the shape of the grain further, this gives us more length to work with when we use Offset to create the actual planks.

To help create the planks we’re going to set up a few Guides to define their edges and make selection easier. What are Guides? Guides are straight lines that sit on top of the image independent of any layers; they are not rendered in the exported image or in print. To use them, make sure you have the following items checked in the View menu:

Show -> Guides

Rulers (make it easier to create new guides than the View -> New Guide menu option)

Snap

Snap To -> Guides

To create a new guide, simply click on either the horizontal or vertical edge at the ruler and drag the cursor where you want the guide to be. Here, we’re going to use two guides to divide the image into thirds. (View -> New Guide will let you type in an absolute value to place the guide, but in my opinion dragging it is faster.)

Create a new layer and change the blend mode from Normal to Multiply. Select a dark brown color and load up the brush tool with a small, hard tip (I used a size 2 and about 70% hardness). Click on the image at the top of one of the guides, then hold down Shift and click at the bottom. Presto, a straight line. Repeat for each guide you placed in the previous step. (Pen tablet users may have to open the Brushes palate and uncheck the Shape Dynamics option to turn off pressure sensitivity, or use the mouse.) Optionally you can play with the Bevel settings under Layer Styles to make the line look sunk into the wood; for these thin cracks we’re not going to.

The next trick is to make the wood planks look separate from each other instead of being cut from the same sheet. Switch back to your wood grain layer. With the Rectangular Marque tool, select one plank at a time. Select Filter -> Other -> Offset.

Be sure to have Wrap Around selected. Again it’s a matter of moving around sliders until you have a look that you like, keeping in mind that you want to avoid obvious repeats between planks.

While you have a plank selected, in a layer on top of the wood grain we’re going to fill the selection with a color in order to bring out the variation even more. I pulled a brownish pink, a paler yellow and a darker brown from the source photo and filled each plank with one of them. The blend mode of the layer was set to Multiply and the opacity to a low setting, about 40%; the opacity of the actual paint bucket fill was also varied.

Repeat the process for each plank. By the end, mine looked like this:

Now for some quick and dirty aging; wood gets stained and faded as it’s exposed to the elements. For your foreground and background colors, pick a white or light grey and a darker (more then 50% but less than “black”) grey. Select Filter -> Render -> Clouds. If you don’t like the pattern you get at first, reapply the filter until you do. Add a Gaussian Blur, about 3px or so, to the clouds. Set the layer blend mode to Overlay and volia; a subtle but noticeable touch of realism. Adjust the levels or contrast if needed.

To add the tool marks requires a few steps. Create a new layer and fill it with 50% Grey at about 50% Opacity.

We need to make a lot of random dots, but at a larger size then what the Noise filter creates by itself. You can do that with one of my new favorite filters, Crystalize.

We do need some noise first however, so select Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise and pile it on.

Uniform vs. Gaussian doesn’t matter much, but make sure you have the Monochromatic option checked.

Now go to Filter -> Pixelate -> Crystallize. I’ve changed the layer to full opacity here so you can see.

The default Cell Size is 10; I usually end up bumping it down to about 6 or 7. Now we need to turn our dots into lines so time to bring out the old standby of wood-makers everywhere, Motion Blur (Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur). We’re looking for lines about the same width as the planks, give or take.

The penultimate filter we need to use is Filter -> Stylize -> Emboss; the reason should be fairly obvious from the picture. Now we have the rough-hewn wood look.

Set the layer blend mode to Soft Light and adjust the Fill Opacity slider as needed, along with levels and/or contrast. Now select each plank section as you did for the wood grain earlier and use the Offset filter to break up the lines.

Here’s the finished door installed in its 3-d home. The crosspieces were cut and pasted from the same wood grain (shrunk back to its original dimensions), then beveled under Layer Styles along with a small drop shadow.