Procedural Texturing tutorial

Introduction to Procedural texturing

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Welcome to this little tutorial about wood. This is just to get you aquainted with a few of Max' basic procedurals. More advanced tutorials will follow. Maybe. What you're going to need is a copy of Max or any 3d package that supports procedural textures (this tutorial should be applicable to most packages). The different maps used are Noise, Wood and Mix. Very simple. I'll try and explain the thought behind what I did, which might mean what some may call "ranting". I'll try and keep it educational. I'll refer to maps as shaders and shaders as maps. If you feel I'm confusing you, mail me, If I get enough mails I'll change it.

The Wood Shader

First of all, lets look at the wood shader. It's very very easy to distinguish it since it pretty much sucks on it's own. The wood we're going to make here merely touches the surface of what you can do to distort the usual, default look. The Wood Shader in Max works by "projecting" concenctric rings along the objects X-axis. distorted using the Radial Noise spinner, and the "Veins" you see are distorted by using the "Axial Noise" spinner. You can use "Grain Thickness" to specify how large the concentric circles will be. Below are a few pictures of the wood with different values.
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To move the center of the projection you use the Offset XYZ spinners in conjunction with the Angle spinners. These come into play if you want to change the angle the Wood uses to project the rings. By changing the spinners you can get projection from the Y-axis, the Z-axis and anything in between. tiling values are also important. These allow you to tile the texture just like a bitmap, but you won't see any seams. This depends on the shader of course, but in this case, you won't see any seams. You will see tiling though, so be careful. I used a value of 2.0 in Y-axis to get more veins. Also rotated it 45 degrees in the X-axis. Experiment to see what fits your scene best. It will be the base for the other wood shader we use.
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Adding Variation

What I did was to try and mix two different wood shaders to get a more irregular look, trying to get away from the default grain. This I did by using the Mix map. The Mix map is your best friend when doing complex (and fairly simple) procedural shaders. Add a mix map and put one wood shader in the "Color #1" slot and copy that wood to the "Color
#2" slot. The problem with the wood texture is that if you change the values too much, the mix will look awful. A little experimentation to see which combination was best was needed here. I ended up offsetting the wood about 0.3 units in the X axis, and some slight changes in the noise and grain thickness. Change the mix value to something around 20-30. With some luck you should have a wood pattern that is slightly irregular. Unfortunately it still looks like the Wood shader. A way to remedy this is by changing the colours to black and white. We're going to use this as a mix map and bump map later on. If you want to, you can keep mixing wood shaders and maybe toss in a noise map or five to get further away from the original look. Experiment. As for this shader, I kept it simple.