A Texture Exploration: Wood
GameTextures.com does a Deep Dive into our Wood Material Category
In theory I have been a Texture Artist for roughly six years. That seems like a very long time but in truth it feels like yesterday that I was first thrown into Substance Designer (way back when it was Allegorithmic and not Adobe). I am pretty comfortable in the tool but I hesitate to call myself more than an initiate with a lot of extraneous knowledge, if I am being serious and Frank (my name is Mike but I can be frank when I need to be, I think) that leaves me feeling like I am lacking compared to my peers. Other duties capture my time and energy, all excuses of course but I prefer to call them reasons while I secretly work on art in the background.
The fact remains that I have spent the last 6 years of my life staring at substances and textures while absorbing via some form of professional osmosis the skills and ideals of my much more skilled coworkers (artists like Keegan Keene, Matt Dirks, Bartosz Buszman, Daniel Rose, Tanner Kalstrom and Ole Midthun). This article and the ensuing ones will be my attempt to catalyze this into something meaningful to pass on while maybe moving my own skill level a bit higher on the board in the process.
This is the first of many deep dives into different materials, starting with the more broad categories found on the GameTextures.com library before eventually moving into more and more specific textures and their applications.
Wood has always been a fascinating material type to me, a texture that seems simple on its face but has an incredible uniqueness that can be very difficult to capture. This is more specific to natural woods of course as vinyl and other synthetic cladding or flooring does not have to abide by the same rules. Wood can be equally warm as it can be cold, an organic but dead material that is among the oldest building materials known to human kind. Even in this era if high technology, a vast majority of our tools, furniture and weapons are still built with at least the modest addition of wood at some point.
The fact is that each tree can have an utterly unique grain pattern and details such as knots and other defects are totally dependent on the growth patterns of the parent tree which in turn can be dependent on factors such as location, environment, biological and ecological pressures. This makes creating wood textures both freeing in a sense but also incredibly difficult. Details and defects and be freely added but the repetition of such details can ruin the illusion quite easily, even if the viewer is not a subject matter expert on wood and its specificities. One of the primary unwritten rules of texture creation is to not counter the assumed gestalt, that could be a rule for 3D work, Art and gamedev in general. If you do need to break the rules, make sure you are breaking them for a specific reason with a specific purpose or it just rings false for no reason.
Personally I have found that creating grain is the most difficult aspect of building wood, there is a lot you can do utilizing warps and such to attempt to capture the organic weft of the wood grain but after a certain point there just needs to be a deeper understanding of why the wood grows the way it does and how to translate that into some level of controllable aspect within the texture program. In practical terms, doing this well means we can create controls within the substance that lets us change the grain dynamically or to adjust it when layered with other materials. Considering the increased complexity when adding things like metal (See the Barrel Material by Chris Alencar below), identifying specific material definitions and making sure they are uniquely attributed is another difficult part of creating the more complex wood materials.
Wood is a poster child for how seemingly simple textures can have layers of complexity beyond what is assumed at first glance and is likely one of the more complex “Base” materials that exists. A base material being a material that can be a stand alone texture but is often meant to be layered and used in conjunction with other materials to create a cohesive scene or render.
There are more examples of badly done wood than there are of wood crafted beautifully but the examples of well done wood are spectacular indeed. One of our favorite sprints was a series of Barrel materials made by our own resident Cooper, Chris Alencar. I joke, though he is not actually a cooper he may as well be a digital one. Chris was able to take a ton of feedback to refine his work from a middling start to an outstanding finish and it is a set of materials that I look back on with a certain level of pride towards his growth.
The intricacies involved in creating wood that I covered earlier were out in full force for these barrels, the layering issues of other material types (metal, Paint) as well as creating unique grain that corresponded to that which would be found on the wood being used. It is somewhat important to remember that a texture artist almost becomes a laymen's material scientist because the details we need to capture usually require at least a little bit of knowledge on how objects age or change under different stress and environments.
Wood is often a major go to for more mid-range tutorials, standing our from the generally beginner friendly Brick and Texture-Plate tutorials that are floating around out there. While I have dove into many a tutorial during my time as a Substance Designer artist, Derk Elshof has one of the best. I use the knotwork node network he uses to great effect in that tutorial and beyond.
The appearance of the wood relies heavily on the specific render engine being used, real shocking information I know. This plays into everything you want to do with wood and each engine has complications and obstacles that are unique to each if you want to try to get a good looking render, much less renders that can look similar across the different engines.
My particular areas of rendering “expertise” lie in Octane and Marmoset (as dedicated renderers) as well as Unreal Engine and Blender if we want to expand the scope out to modelling and engine tools that I can also use to render. Everything on the GameTextures.com library is rendered through Octane at the moment while Marmoset was our preferred render engine in the past. Marmoset is by far the easier of the two and in my experience it handles the Sub-surface scattering(SSS) aspect of wood with fewer steps, Octane requires a lot of seemingly arcane knowledge to nail that aspect of wood but it also handles height better, allowing a truly grainy feel to the wood that does not rely so heavily on normal data. Blender and Unreal can match or even supersede both Octane and Marmoset but also require a bit more work and time to do so. The benefit to any of them is that I can preset a scene if all I want is a texture shot and I can make one that is specific to the needs of wood in particular (such a scene would also be good for anything else that requires a fine touch of SSS, though more adjustments will be needed past that basic level for things like skin and foliage).
Wood is one of the more complex textures to create, many artists can make passable wood but few can make outstanding wood materials. Thankfully at GameTextures.com any time I need to build a scene I can just dip into our gigantic library with over 500 wood materials of various shapes, sizes and types.
Check out the library here!
