HOW DO I CREATE A STYLISED WOOD MATERIAL?

Pietro Chiovaro replies

There are several methods you can use to make stylised wood materials, ranging from using actual photographs edited for a cartoonish appearance in programs like Photoshop, to procedural methods that allow you to create materials from scratch in a more free and creative manner. In this tutorial, we’ll look at a quick and simple way to procedurally create these materials in little more than five minutes with Blender.

In this particular scene, I used the material for the barrels and other props. This specific render is a blend of stylised and photorealistic elements, and the use of the wood was essential to harmonise the different styles of the characters with the realistic environment.

The first step is to create a new material and check Use Nodes before we add in each of the following elements: Texture Coordinate, Mapping, Musgrave Texture, Noise Texture, Color Ramp, Gamma, and finally a Bump node.

Next, let’s mix these together to create the material. First of all we need to place the Texture Coordinate at the beginning of the Material node, then link the Object to the Vector of the Mapping node. Generated or UV are alternatives to the Object, but for this type of material Object works fine.

Now connect the Mapping node’s Vector to the Musgrave Texture, and then the Musgrave Texture to the Vector of the Noise Texture. This is where the wood texture is being created. Before focusing on the parameters, we still need to set the Color Ramp, Gamma and Bump nodes.

Drag the Factor from the Noise Texture and link it to the Color Ramp node. That Color Ramp then has three separate connections. We want to hook it’s Color to the Base Color on the Principled BSDF, the Color to the Gamma node, which links to the Roughness of the Principled BSDF, and finally Color to the Height of the Bump Node, which feeds into the Normal of the Principled BSDF. With that completed, the Color Ramp will now act as a bridge to all the most important connections of the Principled BSDF shader.

The node is now ready, but it won’t look like a wood material yet because we need to set up some parameters. Start with the Scale of the Musgrave Texture, which can be set to 1.000. In the Mapping node set the X to 0.500 and the Y to 3.900, then in the Gamma node add a value of 1.500. For the Bump node, set a Strength of 0.070 along with a distance of 0.200. Lastly we want to set up the colours in the Color Ramp node. Here, I created a brownish shade with the sides darker and the middle part brighter.

With that the material is ready, but keep in mind that these parameters depend on the size and type of props. Use them as a test reference and don’t be afraid to experiment with different values.