Woodgrain

[Jon]

Is there a simple way to bring out the grain pattern of any wood material so it stands out more and also create a tighter grain pattern? On my particular project, when I add say a light wood material over a 2x6 wood plank that's 40 feet long it looks washed out with a grain pattern that looks more like the dull wave bitmap than wood grain. Any help would be appreciated.

Jon

[CADTutor]

Jon, to do this, you'll need to get to grips with the Deep Texture Editor (not a frightening as it looks) and the Transform Tools. You can access both these areas through the Materials Lab (see illustration).

http://www.cadimage.net/cadtutor/matlab.jpg

Use the Transform Tools to change the scale of your material so that it better matches the object scale. Use the DTE to change the colour etc. of the material. If your material is just looking a bit washed out, try reducing the value for "Ambience" in the Materials Lab before going to the DTE, this might just do the trick.

It's also worth playing about with the mapping of the material - this can have quite a big effect on the way the material is displayed.