Wood Grain Tip for RayTrace

[Renerabbitt]

Piggybacking on the post from Alaskan_Son which you should take a look at Here..

Here are some steps towards getting normals maps into your renderings for more realistic materials using photoshop in Windows with corresponding pictures.

With no support for reflection maps in chief, Normals maps are the closest thing we can get to reflection maps.

Step 1,

use the material definition adjustment tool to find your base texture. Copy the path and then paste into a Windows explorer window but do not press enter. Delete the portion of the url that contains the zip as seen in... 

Step 2 Locate the texture and extract to a folder so we can open it in photoshop

Step 3

In the case of this wood floor I want some relief between the floor boards. Ideally we would enlarge the texture to a much larger resolution for better detail. In any case, we highlight the sections that will be recessed and paint them black.

Then select the inverse of the black sections we painted and go over the wood grain with a white. I don't want to cover the wood grain entirely as it will become a reflection map for me, so i set the opacity of the brush I use to 30 percent and go over the grain for 1 pass

Step 4

Go to the filter/3d/generate Normals map. I want the relief in the floor boards to be very subtle, so I turn down the detail scale from 80(shown) 

to a more modest 30. Save as a different file name to be located using chief.

Step 5

Locate your normals map and then click on the properties tab to adjust your material to your liking. It may take a few raytraces to really dial in the texture but this makes an obvious difference in depth and reflection

 

BEFORE                                             AFTER

                         

 

 

This technique works for all materials, and should be used on ALL materials for more realistic raytraces..MAKE SURE TO SAVE YOUR MATERIAL!

[warrenwest]

Thank you for that