Recently I've had the urge to create a wooden bowl. Sculpting is quite trivial. There are various ways to apply a wood-grain texture, but is there any way to make the grain variations accurate (i.e. as if carved from a single wood block) ? It doesn't seem possible with the texture mapping/painting techniques I'm familiar with. Tutorials I've found on carving just apply displacement to a surface pattern. I may need to put on my "problem-solving" hat. One nice reference:
Hmm. "Project from view" (top/bottom) is pretty close to the desired, if the bowl is convex and not too steep. (If the rim is smaller than the width, things get tricky.) I tried to visualize it "procedurally" and got something like the following.
