"Chris R" <car### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> Maybe this is an obvious trick to some of the veterans here, but I thought it
> was an interesting way to get good color maps for wood, so here it goes.
>
> I was working on some wood flooring for a scene and found a site called
> wood-database.com that has images and information on lots of different types of
> wood, including images of lumber made from the types of wood.
>
> I downloaded an image of the wood I wanted to replicate in my scene, (the lower
> left inset in the image below), and imported it into GIMP.  In the Colors/Info
> menu there is a "Smooth Palette" option that creates a palette of the colors in
> the image, (seen to the right of the inset).  I exported that as a JPEG and then
> used some macros I created to pull out the POV-ray colors from the image.  I
> have used both interpolation and non-interpolation for different effects.  I
> then use those colors, in the order given, to create the color map for the wood
> texture.
>
> Coming up with the wood pigment and warps is still mostly trial and error, but
> the sample is actually pretty close.
>
> The three boards are rendered using variations on the color map.  The center one
> is non-translated and unaltered.  The right has been lightened, and the grain
> was selected randomly from a normal-sized pine tree.  The left was grayed by
> aging, and also randomly selected.
>
> In this particular example, I only sampled the colors from a single ring of the
> wood pattern.  For others, the colors vary across rings, so it works better to
> use all of the colors in the color map, but scale the pigment so the ring sizes
> stay the same.
>
> Anyway, I'm finding this is a lot easier than my usual hit or miss method of
> creating a wood colormap, and allows for greater variation in the colors, which
> enhances realism.
>
>
> -- Chris R.


That's excellent Chris. Nice work. I came close to writing a macro to do the
same - generate a pov color_map from a given image. Mind sharing the macro? :)
Mike.

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