One thing I didn't like about the spear images I posted earlier is that the wood looks entirely flat. In some images, the 12-sided spear half looked like a flat drawing. Gotta fix that. I can do a bit by creating a higher poly version and then projecting that shaped onto the existing shaft, creating a normal map that is more rounded, but I think most of the reason it looks so flat is that there's no fine detail on the wood other than the color. Well, that's fixable too!
Blender has an initially intimidating number of ways to generate textures instead of downloading images from websites, but once you get used to what they can do you can slowly add bits of information to what you know as you need to. Last week was wood week for me, and I'll see if I can apply what all of those tutorals and forum posts have taught me.
Here's the wood I have so far.
I've used the same grain for all of them because... well, why not? They look a bit odd when you set them next to each other like that, but so do multiple copies of the same item. The only way to avoid that is to make each spear generate a new texture, and any actual game developer that heard that would likely slap me for even suggesting it.
But you can see that I've got what I'm thinking of as White Oak, Oak, Threestem, Black Walnut, and Cherry. Not sure why I made cherry. Just wanted red wood, I suppose. All I had to do was copy an existing wood and change the colors, so it's not like it took too much time.
Now, those are a bit glossier than the others I posted, but that's just a change in the roughness slider. Still no fine details in texture, as you can see when you look at the highlighted sections of each staff. They're just entirely smooth wooden dowels. Kinda boring. Let's see what we can do.
Some of the wood materials I've seen have the different colors in the grain differentiated by either normal map or roughness map. I'm not sure if the roughness should be different, but I can run that grain through a bump map to give the final material a bit of variety.
And here's an angled view, which may give you all a better idea of what the difference is.
An odd site note: The top texture (white oak) worked fine, but the only way I could get the other woods working was by connecting the bump node to the grain from the white oak node group instead of the node group for its own wood type. No idea why. I'll have to simplify my node arrangements so that I only use one grain node group for all woods instead of duplicating it for each type. Simpler, cleaner, and less likely to do weird things like that.
