It’s been a while since my last tutorial. And today felt like a great time for a new one. It may be the choking Atlanta humidity, or the fact that the never ending afternoon commute rain has temporarily ended. Probably a delicious mixture of both.

I decided to make this tutorial showing the process I used to create the wood texture below for the pirate sub above.

Here is the finished texture. I wanted a hand painted stylized look with really rough wood grain. I’d like to do a future tutorial showing the process I use to create a wood texture with a much more subtle grain. But for now I’ll stick with this one.

The first thing to do is lay down the base color. It should be something similar to your final color, but you can always adjust as you go along. Like my stone tutorial here:  Stone Tut,  run a Render>Clouds filter to add a slight amount of variety to the base color.

Next step is to lay down the planks.  Add a new layer and start putting them down. Make sure you test how well the texture tiles as you go along.  Check the length of the planks, the spacing, and the gaps. And do try to add some variety. But don’t make any one plank stand out, anything that stands out will make the tiled texture obvious, and that is very bad for tiled textures and board conformist everywhere.

Once I have the planks laid down I use a small brush to draw the wood grain on a new layer. I like to use the notches and nubs in the planks as a starting point for the grain. Keep it pretty random while still going in the right direction (Basically keep it going the long way).

I feel the grain layout is going to work, now I’ll start adding some depth and dimension. I use a lighter brush to pop the grain out a bit, and a darker brush to add some depth. Test it out on a few planks to see if it will continue working. And if it’s working, keep it going!

I’m pretty happy with the way the grain is turning out, so I continued adding grain to the rest of the planks.

Now that I’ve got the grain laid down with some depth, I use an even lighter brush to add a little bit of pop to the texture. I highlight the highest areas, along with adding a slight amount of highlight to the top edge of the boards.  Also add some darker spots to the grain as well. And just like the highlights, add a darker edge to the bottom of the board.  It’s very rough at this stage, the grain looks like it’s a few inches deep and prone to causing six inch splinters, certainly not sea worthy.  But that will all be toned down before the texture is finished.

Time for some de-graining. I adjust the contrast and opacity of the grain layer to tone it down a bit. I also went in and shorted the gap and spacing between the planks. They were far too wide and at that point you might as well have a sub made of swiss cheese. I also added some small nail heads to the end of each plank because they felt so right.

I’m pretty happy with the way the planks turned out up to this point. To finish it off I adjusted the brightness and contrast levels on the whole image, and added a slight sharper filter to make it a bit more crisps.

To add some more variety to you textures you can add some color to make the planks look painted. Here is a sample of the red planks on the sub above.  You can continue adding additional wear and tear, I originally went with a very worn paint look but decided it was too much for this particular model and went with something much simpler.  Spend some time trying things out and find what works best for your particular project.

I hope this tutorial helps, thanks for checking it out and stay tuned for future tutorials.