Procedural wood textures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a procedural method for generating wood textures that accurately reproduce the appearance of figured wood, simplifying the creation process and enabling quick previews.

Contribution

It presents a novel procedural wood shader that models growth patterns, reducing the need for laborious parameter tuning and specialized equipment.

Findings

The shader can produce realistic, detailed wood textures.

It is fast enough for real-time previews.

The approach captures distinctive features of prized figured wood.

Abstract

Existing bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) models are capable of capturing the distinctive highlights produced by the fibrous nature of wood. However, capturing parameter textures for even a single specimen remains a laborious process requiring specialized equipment. In this paper we take a procedural approach to generating parameters for the wood BSDF. We characterize the elements of trees that are important for the appearance of wood, discuss techniques appropriate for representing those features, and present a complete procedural wood shader capable of reproducing the growth patterns responsible for the distinctive appearance of highly prized ``figured'' wood. Our procedural wood shader is random-access, 3D, modular, and is fast enough to generate a preview for design.