Creating Realistic Wood Texture in Maya, using only Procedural Textures

In this Tutorial I will try to walk you through the procedure of creating a Realistic Mahogany Wood Texture in Maya using just procedural textures. This textures works perfectly with Mental Ray and the default maya renderer, unfortunately the Wood 3d texture doesn’t work in V-Ray for Maya, let’s hope the guys at Chaos Group will fix that soon.

1. We start with a simple Blinn, you can use Phong or Phong E as well, in the Hypershade window select Blinn.

Start by opening up the hypershade window by going to: Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade

We start with a simple Blinn, you can use Phong or Phong E as well, in the Hypershade window select Blinn.

Open Attribute Editor by double clicking on blinn1 in the Hypershade. Now in the color slot create a render node by clicking on the checker next to the color slider. Once you click the checker a window will appear so you can select the render node that you want to link to the color attribute.

 From the left panel select 3D Textures, from the right side now select Wood.

Now we start working on the wood node:

 We start with the Filler Color by choosing the color R: 0.275 , G: 0.039 , B: 0.008 (feel free to experiment with any color tones you want, the best way is to open a photo of the wooden texture you want to create and try to sample some tones from there, this way you will be sure to get the right wood color that you want to achieve).

 For the Vein Color you can do the same thing and choose a color like R: 0.412, G: 0.140, B: 0.067

 But for the Vein Color I want to try something more, just to add more texture and color. click on the checker next to the Vein Color slider this will open the window that lets you select the render node that you want to use.

 Select Stucco from the hypershade left window , Stucco node is also a 3D texture.

 For the stucco in the Channel 1 color I used R: 0.431, G: 0.114, B:0.000, for the Channel 2 color I used #R: 0.148, G: 0.028, B: 0.019, everything else I left it all the same, (feel free to play with the shaker if you want to see different results).

 Back to the wood1 node either by clicking on the arrow pointing to the right

or double click on the wood1 node in the hypershade window. Now that we are back into the wood1 Attribute Editor we have to play around with some setting so we can get the desired effect.

Noise Attributes

Amplitude X: 1.0

Amplitude Y: 1.0

Ratio: 0.264

(Again feel free to try your own settings, I have used these inputs because they work well for the feel I was going for)

 Now to create the wood bump, keep in mind that depending on how aged you want your wooden texture to be you should adjust the depth value. This part is really simple. We are going to re-use the wooden texture we did before. In hypershade selectwood1 , then in hypershade window go to Edit > Duplicate > Shading Network this should create a duplicate of the entire shade network that we created earlier. Now we just have to do some changes to the color.

 Double click on the Newly created wood2, in the attribute editor change the Filler Color to a 50 % grey ( feel free to experiment here) I used #747474.

 For the Vein Color click on the arrow pointing to the right next to the slider, it will take you to the newly created stucco2, for the Channel 1 I used R: 0.117, G:0.117, B:0.117, for Channel 2 I used R:0.185, G:0.185, B:0.185.

 Now for the final part of the Bump select wood2 hold middle click and drag and drop over the Blinn, this will reveal a list which you select where you want to link that shader, from that list select bump map it will automatically create a bump3dwhich is a general utility node.

 Double click on the newly created bump3d, as you can see the Bump Value is not editable this is because the wood2 controls the value of the bump, change the Bump Depth to 0.010 . I know this is very low but I do want a very subtle bump effect (Don’t be afraid to experiment with those values).

 Create a new node from Hypershade’s left panel scroll under 3D Textures and click on Solid Fractal. We will use this node to add some black shade over the Mahogany Wood just to have a bit more color variations.

 Double click on Blinn so it opens the Attribute Editor. Now select SolidFractal from Hypershade Middle click and drag and drop over the Blinn’s Diffuse slot in Attribute Editor slot. This is another way you can link nodes to the different attributes of the Material you are working with, now if you look in the hypershade you will see that a connection has been created between the SolidFractal and Blinn.

 Double click on Solid Fractal in Hypershade to open its attributes, here are the settings that I have used.

Just to be sure the Wood shader will show up correctly on your model, back in the Hypershade double click on theplace3dTexture connected to the wood1 in the Attribute Editor click on the button that says Fit to Group BBox, now repeat this for all the place3dtextures that are linked to wood2, stucco1, stucco2.

Again don’t forget to experiment with your own colors and settings, feel free to share your results. I would love to see what you come up with. Here is the entire Shader map in case you guys wanna check it out.