Let me show you an easy method for adjusting wood textures by using 3ds Max’s “Real World Parameter” function.
No need to adjust each object with UVW map, just apply “Use Real World Scale” function and you’ll have your texture distributed perfectly over your wood panel objects.
“Color Correction” is another fast 3ds Max function for changing color and getting a good variety of natural looking wood, simply duplicate your shader and change it’s colorization.
Use the “Advanced” section, since the Standard can damage your texture appearance in the scene.
Create Realistic Wood Material in VRay
A great library for getting high quality seamless wood textures for FREE is the Textures.com portal. You’ll need to sign up for a free account to download the textures. And if ever you need Hero textures, you can get a premium account for downloading ultra high resolution versions of the textures.
The most important step is getting the scale of the texture right. Just apply a Box UVW mapping on the wooden object with ‘Real-World Map Size’ option turned on. Another setting you should turn on is the ‘Use Real-World Scale’ in the Map Coordinates rollout. You can turn both of these on by default in General settings of Max’s Preferences. Now all you need to do is enter the real height and width of this texture. This data may be provided with the texture or you can easily guess the real size it might be of. You can reduce the blur value of the texture all the way down for crisp diffuse map detail.
The key to getting a realistic wood material lies in the details. Little things like reflection and bump play a great role. Therefore we’ll be focusing on getting the balance between these things right. If the wood is a bit too shiny or dull, it will lose its realism. The human eye is highly trained in finding such descrepancies. So the physical properties of the material should match the texture as much as possible.
The reflection and bump will be controlled by ‘copy’ maps of our texture. Simply desaturate(-100 value) them with a new Color Correction node. Keep some blur to these textures so that we don’t get fireflies or a snowfall effect. Tweak around with advanced RGB and Gamma values for creating the reflection and bump maps. A strength value of 20 for reflection and 12 for bump will work nicely here.
Another thing to keep in mind is variation. We’ll have to create many material versions using the same texture for added realism. This is where the color correction and advanced lightness controls come into play. Now you can go ahead and create these extra versions by tweaking the Hue/Saturation and RGB and Gamma in the Color Correction node. And by randomly applying these to the different planks, you’ll get nice realistic variation. Moreover, you can try and add variation in reflection glossiness ranging between 0.6 and 0.8 as well.
If you want to check out my render settings and the final setup of this texture – you can DOWNLOAD it here
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Talk soon,
Alex
