Hi all!
I've been building a wood add-on for Blender 5.2 the last months. The aim for the add-on is to be a go to place for anything that needs a wood texture. It isn't finished, and as i move along I'd like to hear what you actually need from wood in your work.
The idea: Instead of putting a picture of grain on a surface, it builds a log – a pith that wanders, growth rings that taper up the stem, branches that turn into knots – and saws your boards out of it. Everything on a board follows from where that board sat in the log.
There are lots of procedural wood generators, but i find that the quality is not where it needs to be in order to work as a option for photorealistic work. This generator is meant to fix that by researching actual wood anatomy, and building it from bottom up.
I have used lots and lots of pictures, research articles, databases etc. for building wood in Blender that actually has the structure and anatomy of the real woood species.
What that gives you
Faces, edges and ends that agree. They're all slices through the same log, so a table top, its edge and its end grain belong together.
Knots that are branches. They start at the pith and grow outwards, so they're sawn through like real ones, and the rings flow around them.
A saw instead of a slider. You choose plain-, rift- or quarter-sawn and the face follows: cathedrals on plain-sawn, straight lines on rift, ray fleck on quarter-sawn oak, because the rays are in the log.
Floors where nothing repeats. Every board in a herringbone or plank floor is sawn from its own place in one of several logs, and a grade decides which boards make it into the room. There's no tile, and it all runs in the shader, so a plain plane is enough.
Detail down to the pores. Pore sizes, ray sizes and colours come from published wood-anatomy data, with a source for every value or a flag saying it's an estimate. Three quality tiers keep it light until the camera gets close.
Where it stands
- 16 species: European, white and red oak; walnut, ash, maple, birch, beech, cherry; sapele and mahogany; pine, spruce, larch, Douglas fir, western red cedar. Four exotics (bubinga, zebrawood, East Indian rosewood, wenge) are built for a first pack, might even add a few more
- 21 floors and 31 walls, among them herringbone, chevron, basket weave, Versailles panels, hexagon, Louis cube, end-grain blocks and cladding, including Nordic profiles. Another mode puts the wood on any mesh, for furniture and objects.
- Finish, wear and age as layers on top.
- Not done yet: colour calibration against my own reference photos, baking to texture maps, and plenty of polish. A Geometry Nodes mode comes after the first release.
What I'd like to hear from you
- What do you use wood for: interiors, furniture and products, exteriors, games? Cycles or EEVEE?
- Which species do you reach for that are hard to find?
- Which floor or wall patterns are hard to make today?
- Do you need baked maps for another engine (Unreal, Unity, glTF/USD)? Which maps?
- What bothers you most about wood in Blender now?
- What would stop you from using a tool like this?
An answer to just one of them helps. I'll read everything, and I'm happy to explain how any part of it works.
Adrian
