Need advice on creating Oak bark texture

[jackddeane]

I have been trying to emulation old oak bark for about 3 days straight...No joke. I would say I am intermediate skill level in Designer but this is the hardest texture I have tried to make yet, so any detailed advice would be GREATLY appreciated.

I am specifically finding it hard to nail down the inter-connected system of deep cracks that run mostly vertical, but also with smaller joining horizontal cracks.



I have tried using a tile sampler but don't really have the broader knowledge of the program to nail down the primary shapes properly and make them interact with each other the way natural Oak bark does.



My most recent go I tried using Cells 3 with different levels masks and directional warps but that just came out kind of..blobby.



Edit: I think my images are broken, maybe they are too big? But if you click image icon it will still load them up.

[Drewtaylor3d]

This is how I would start it personally, for a step by step:

Cells 1 (Default Settings)
v
Transform 2D: Height stretched to about 400%
v
Make it Tile Photo (Default Settings)
v
Ambient Occlusion: height depth=0.1 Radius=0.4
v
Blend AO and Make it tile together with multiply at 75% to push crevasses down
v
directional warps just to add some natural chaos

Hope this helps

[jackddeane]

Oh wow, that's brilliant. I'd been trying to figure out how I could squish the cells to elongate them without destroying the tiling, didn't realise the 'make it tile' node existed aha. Thank you!

[Cory McG]

One trick that can also help, possibly, is to change the pixel size setting in Base Parameters of a Distance node. This affects how distance is calculated, which can give a good, tilable cells-like result with long shapes instead of round.

Combining this with a seed image made up of lines instead of dots can give you lots of control over the shape of the bits, as well. Just another option if the other technique previously mentioned doesn't quite get you there.