Realistic Wood Planks by futuremotion

nice

Wowza!
That's hyper realistic
Very cool wood planks filter!

Thanks to both of you. And yes Totte, I must say your filter collection is highly impressive!

Awesome! Thanks a lot CFandM. I am working on several more goodies right now

Thanks for the kind suggestions Nebukadnezar. I will absolutely add these controls in soon along with several more that I have planned in the next version.

Looks almost real! If you can, do what Nebukadnezar suggested about the texture on neighboring planks (an offset might do the job). And welcome to FF.

WOW! Love it! This is SO realistic. The grain is great and the dents and knots (although those look like "dings" to me) are right on. I really like how you have controls for so many elements of the image. I know I'll be using this a lot. If these are your first filters, I can't wait to see what else you'll be bringing us. Keep up the awesome work!

Thanks guys! A spankin' new upd ate has been submitted and should be live as soon as it gains approval fr om the mods.

This was a huge upd ate to the filter, I added a LOT of things (as requested fr om various commentators) and I think the changes really show in the new presets. Some of them are ridiculously realistic if tweaked correctly and I'd LOVE to see what anyone here makes with it.

Here's a full change-log for anyone interested since I didn't have enough characters in the update description:

- Completely reworked the pattern system and input flow to effectively use offsets and randomization (Thanks Nebukadnezar and Morgantao). There are now no issues with wood grain "running through" into other planks.

- Completely reworked the "knotting" system to use Bomber rather than a noise texture. This gives far more control over various properties of the wood knotting, such as knot density, probability, scale, rotation, etc. I've exposed much of these functions via controls so that it's easier to tweak and get that "perfect" look.

- Added a way to control the spacing and bevel of panels. If bevel and spacing are se t to 0, the height map for panels is completely disabled.

- Added color controls for all major grain "types" and features. This allows for you to manually eyedrop the colors of photographed wood and paste in for maximum realism.

- Exposed more controls for modifying various properties of the grain. The dark grain in the wood is controlled by a perlin noise module with a wave profile function (the "special sauce", if you will). This is the most realistic way I've found so-far to emulate wood grain and it gives beautiful "rings" to the surface. I've exposed all of the important modifiers to this wave function so that you can easily achieve many different types of grain with minimal tweaking.

- And lastly (my favorite), I added a checkbox to easily disable pattern mode so that you can render out flat panels of wood with the same material. I can see this being especially useful for archvis textures.

Known Issues and Planned Improvements:

- The knots occasionally repeat themselves in tiled output due to the way that the "bricks" module works when filling tiles if se t to "jumble". When I have time, I am going to try and create a home-brew pattern system that fixes this and (hopefully) also allows for much more exact control over the pattern itself, such as rotation, number of V/H tiles, etc.

- The knots don't really have too much variation in shape. This will also be addressed in a later update.

- Will be adding more options for surface deformation and imperfections, such as scuffs, paint smears, dirt, grime, and more.

Lastly: Here is a link to several higher-res screenshots of the included presets using all of the above so you can see wh ere it's at:

http://files.futuremotion.net/filterforge/wood/

Since the filter is rather complex, there are likely a ton of cool looks that I haven't discovered, so don't take these as the strict limitations of the filter. I'd love it if any of you could make some presets. My goal is to basically make the "ultimate solution" for procedural wood in Filter Forge, and to be candid, hopefully I can attain high use as I am a broke graphic designer and can't really afford the program.

ANY help or recommendations are hugely welcome.

This is friggin awsome!
I just had a look at the link you post, that is really good

About the random spaces, it's a known issue, the forum is hyper-defensive with SQL words. No need to edit the post.

I think it's just a complicated filter to begin with, so AO probably would take quite long, especially on default settings.

Although I tried a very very quick render, and judging by stuff it seems like you can get away using the bump/height map as AO. I'd save the bump map as a 16bit tiff, then squeeze the levels on it until the grays are white. Computationally different, but pretty sure it'll look similar enough that it wouldn't be an issue.

If it looks too different, you can try alternative routes like generating AO through normal maps and so on.