Hey guys and gals, I am working on a project, and I am trying to recreate a 'painted'(?) wood texture for some fancy cabinets. I feel like I am close or maybe there (doubt it). May I have some suggestions? I really need to do some more shader courses. Shading is certainly my weak spot in Blender.
Test Renders 1,2
My shader node setup
reference photo
Photo link. same as below.
Should I UV unwrap and mark seams on the corners where the wood is joined together and rotate accordingly so the grain is going in the proper direction with the length of the wood to create more realism?
The UV mapping does help drastically.
This is with bump at 0.1
This is with bump at 0.2
The higher bump seems to offset the shininess of the material to give it more depth.
Material creation is hard, but also fun. One thing we tend to neglect is that shading goes hand in hand with lighting and viewing angels. It's an interplay of you tweaking the nodes, the lights and where you're viewing it all from. Also if you're seeing the object without anything casting shadows on it or the environment or HDRI hitting it full blast. And also the size of the light matters. Always the most important thing is to look at reference, it's where you'll get all your information about surfaces from.
You have to see how your material is reacting to the light when it comes to your cabinets, from what I see you may be flooding it with too much light. I like to use a single spot lamp to start with, and make it small so the bump map really comes out and I can dial it in. But it's all going to change depending on the conditions of the lighting, so we test the material with different lights setup. And then once the materials react as they should, then you can light your scene the way you want to and you'll be confident materials will react like they should. It's hard to explain by text, you should definitely watch come courses.
Mostly all of Kent's tutorials deal with materials, he loves it. So we can link you one or two courses to start with if you want.
I will examine the materials with a spot lamp to see how they react, as you stated. I am a very big fan of Kent's courses! They are so informative and fun. I have done a majority of them and should probably redo a few of them to cement the information in a bit better. The shader forge course is truly something I have been wanting to complete. Perhaps I should download the proper Blender version that the course is filmed on to complete. I attempted it a while back and was getting some odd results on the latest version of Blender.