Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Timber - A Realistic Procedural PBR Wood Material

18

Erin writes:

When working on interior scenes, I’m always coming up against issues with not having exactly the right wood image textures or they don’t tile properly or they need recolouring etc. I used to be a cabinet maker so I’m never happy looking at an obviously faked wood texture and there are just a lot of features that I wanted to be able to use. Hence, Timber.

Timber is a procedural wood material created using Blender’s node system, which means that by changing a few parameters, you can totally change how the material looks. It also means that it's infinitely scalable without tiling, and infinitely configurable with the many inputs that are available on the node group front-end! There are two versions available, a Pro version that comes will all the functionality I could squeeze in (but is only cycles compatible due to Eevee's node limit) and a Lite version that works great with Eevee but loses nails, medullary rays, splits and planer ripple. They might look a bit daunting but I've included 6 presets with each one as a starting place if you want, they also each come with documentation that explains what each of the inputs is for!

Whether it's an antique Oak herringbone floor, or a Tulipwood wardrobe, or birch-faced ply for a minimal interior, Timber has got you covered.

Here's a brief overview of Timber Lite:

Both are available for FREE here on Gumroad. Or if you would like to support me, Blender Market AND the Blender Fund in one go, you can get it for $5 from Blender Market.

There's a more detailed post over at Blender Artists.

About the Author

Erindale Woodford

I am a professional designer and 3D artist. I trained in Interior Design but my passion is proceduralism! I've been using Blender since 2.49b.

18 Comments

  1. Hey,
    its just wow!!!
    Unfortunately I cant install it ... install from file do not work for me
    I use Blender 2.8 the newest release.

  2. Hello. I'd like to try your shaders but, if i want to use the Material (Lite) in Blender 2.82a my Blender crashs (stuck in loading - and dont react anymore). I'm working in OSX. Is ther a conflict with the newest version of Blender?

    Thanks.

    • This is something another OSX person told me. I’m afraid I don’t have anyway to debug this. Is this happening with both Eevee and cycles? It might well be a ram issue

      • On Cycles it works just fine! Thank you for the hint. I'll use it with Cycles and test it on a Win-System another day. Thank you for your help!

  3. Cycles is a lot better at handling complex nodes! The Lite version I had to make specifically to work beneath the Node limit in Eevee but I guess it must still be pretty close to the limit if some people are having trouble with it! There are nodes you can remove if you don't need all the functionality and you can get your head around the spaghetti inside! Trust in cycles ;)

  4. Hey Erin, thank you for the amazing shader! I think the problem with Windows- which I also have- is the RAM indeed, also in Cycles.
    I also noticed that when I use it on certain objects it works just how it should while on other objects it shows only black, even if they show all other kinds perfectly well.
    Do you have any idea how this can be fixed?

    • Hi Nat!
      The shader normally only shows black if the UV unwrap has mesh islands extending into the negative spaces of the UV space. Double check that your black objects are unwrapped properly and in the UV editor, that all the parts of the mesh are within the UV area! It's fine to rotate them to align the timber but keep them inside the UV space to avoid any unwelcome artifacts!

  5. Hi Erin, fantastic product! Definitely worth more than $0 or even $5! The problem I'm having is that it's slowed my rendering times by about 400%. I use cycles exclusively, along with ecycles rtx, and what would normally take an hour or two has extended to four or eight! The archviz project I'm working on does have a lot of large wood surfaces, so that may be a problem. Any thoughts on how to fix this?

    • Hi Adrea!
      That is a significant performance hit! I'm sorry it's causing those issues! I would expect slightly slower renders but only really at the initial computation and maybe only adding 10 minutes to a particularly heavy scene? I haven't used Ecycles so I don't know if I maybe created something that doesn't play well? My recommendation would be to get your shaders looking right and bake a decent sized tile and then touch it up in photoshop to make seamless. That's the only way I can think of that would improve performance right now.
      I made timber 10 months ago and I've learned a huge amount about proceduralism since then so I do intend to build a version 2 this summer (just waiting until after my final uni submission). I'll tackle a lot of the performance issues then and make it a bit more modular.
      Sorry I can't be of more help now!

      • Dude, seriously, You are AWESOME! I can't imagine how people can come up with this stuff. I'm glad geniuses like you exists! Keep up the good work!

  6. Hey Erin, I greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness, you have helped people like me who don't know a lot about creating new materials procedurally, it looks hard and tedious.

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×