How to align multiple wave textures?

Question

When creating wood textures in Blender, I often use the Cycles 'Wave' procedural texture (the equivalent of the Blender-Internal 'Wood' texture). I can use it to create what appears to be very realistic wood grain.

However, I run into a problem whenever I'm modeling wood blocks with sharply cut edges. Real wood would have a different cross-sectional type of grain on each side, depending on how it was cut (for example, in the image below, one side would have a 'ring' structured texture, and the other two would each have a different 'band' texture). Moreover, if you look at any one of the individual dark bands, you'll see that they 'align' with each other across the three faces.

Is it possible to make three different procedural textures that align with each other in this way? If that isn't possible, is there any way to produce a similar effect using other techniques?

Answer 1

A very flexible way to make the texture is to make it from scratch with the nodes, not relying on the built-in, a bit limited wave texture. Using some math nodes and adjusting the value results in a pretty nice wood texture.

Here the two vector inputs define a line that passes through both (the core of the three), and the distance from that to the object surface is calculated inside the distance node.

The surface positions are distorted a bit by adding a bit of noise to them, the distance calculation is done per the equation here.

Using modulo makes the distance from the surface to the line a looping range of values from 0 to the distance between the waves in the wood. Multiplying that by the inverse of the distance brings the range to 0 - 1, which can then be mapped into a nice gradient using a map range node. That can be used to multiply or mix the color value to achieve the final result.

See also:

• http://www.minimaexpresion.es/?p=690&lang=en
• http://materialw.wordpress.com/materials/wood-material/
• http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?246113-A-fine-procedural-wood-material-for-Cycles
• http://shiny-dynamics.blogspot.fr/2012/04/wood-texture-for-blender.html
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Procedural_Textures
• http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Types/Procedural/Wood
• http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/52626 (mirror of previous link)

Answer 2

If you can use generated coordinates, there shouldn't be a need for multiple textures. Just adjust the mapping to place and distort the grain to your liking.

Answer 3

I know this is an old question, but it's very simple to solve. The wave texture is taking an input vector that uses all three axes (X, Y, and Z). A sphere is basically x, y, and z, equally in all directions. If you eliminate the Z axis, it becomes a cylinder because it's just x and y along a constant z. If that doesn't make sense, here's a super simple node network that just removes Z, and you'll see it gets you on your way to what you want.

Play with the colors and distortion values, as well as the scaling coordinates, and you should arrive at a decent basic wood.

You probably want to use Object coordinates rather than Generated, because Object coordinates make the shader as if your objects are carved from a solid piece. Generated coordinates are like painting on the surface.

If you want to dive into an advanced network of nodes for wood, I have several blog posts that go into great detail of how I create a realistic wood shader: my blog