After an in depth study of wood textures (actually fifteen minutes of
trial and error) these points are the points I came up with:

- The lighted area should be bright enough so that it is not grayed out
and details are clearly visible.
- The dark area should have the ambient set so that it is dark enough to
have a good contrast with the light area and brightr enough to show the
details of the texture.
- The border between light and dark should be a gradient, not a definite
change.
- Specular and roughness are very important, for wood, try 0.1 and 0.015
respectively. This corresponds to a highlight on a fairly reflective but
still imperfect surface.
- And finally, because the specular highlight will have a perfect shape
normally, distort it by adding a bumps normal scaled to be minimally
visible in terms of surface shading, but be enough to make the specular
highlight slightly distorted.

Please note that these points work under standard lighting conditions,
changes would have to be made to get this to look right under very
bright conditions.

For the wood texture, these settings worked best and by varying the
global ambient, I was able to get the scene to vary accurately from dim
lighting to harsh outdoor lighting:

Ambient: 0.3
Diffuse: 0.8
Briliance: 1 (anything higher than 1.5 seemed too brilliant, anything
lower than 1.0 caused the line between light and dark to look unnatural)
Specular: 0.1
Roughness: 0.015

normal: bumps 0.1 
	scaled to <0.1,0.1,0.1>

I hope this has helped all those interested, any coments would be
appreciated.

-- 
Chris Maryan
mailto:cma### [at] geocitiescom
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