Adding Overlaid Details

There is still a little touch of detail I would like to add. Some wood have some dark filament running through them. To add those filaments, Right-Click on the "Wood Color" material parent node and select "Add Attribute". And change this attribute into a "Sine" turbulence combiner.

You may add as many nodes to the root material node. This allows you to overlay details. Any lower node attributes will have precedence over the upper nodes. In other words, lower node attributes will overwrite upper node attributes.

Do not define the upper attribute of this new Sine combiner. Leave it exactly as it was created. No color, no nothing. But set the color of the second attribute to RGB=100,88,47. Set the Sine Scale to x=400, Y and Z = 10, Amplitude = 4000 and Octave = 5.

We're pretty much done.

Yet another important concept about material is the fact that when you do not define an attribute, it have no effect on the rendered result. By leaving the first attribute undefined, wherever this attribute would have been visible, the underlying material shows through. Conversely, because we have defined a color property for this attribute, its color takes precedence over the underlying material.

Now we want to add some varnish highlights on the plank. We could go through all the attribute nodes in the tree and add a Specular Color, Size and Intensity. A more efficient way to do that is to simply add another attribute at the root node and define those specular properties there.

So Right-Click on the "Wood Color" material parent node and select "Add Attribute". Click on this new Attribute and set its Specularity Color to White, Size = 20 and Intensity = 30. OK.

Now we're pretty much done with the color layer.

You may define different properties on different attributes overlays. In this case, the specularity being undefined on the upper attribute nodes are not in conflict with the specularity defined on this lower node.

We could have achieved the same specularity effect but with more future flexibility by specifying the specularity on the model instead. But the reason I did it this way is because I had another idea. I would like my specularity to differ between the dark rings and the lighter rings. Darker rings should produce tighter specularity because it is denser while the lighter rings should produce wider specularity because it is softer.

So lets convert this attribute to a Spherical Combiner and set its scale, translation, ring sizes and blur the same as for the first spherical and add the same turbulences in the same order and with the same settings too. Now set the first attribute (the softer wood) specularity to Color=white, Size=54 and Intensity=10 and the second attribute (the harder wood) specularity to Color=white, Size=15 and Intensity=20.

Now, with the highlights, it looks a little less like wood when viewed from the top but when viewed from a birds eye view, we can see that the material still have its wood characteristics.