More than just building material.
Engineered wood has come a long way since its inception in the late 19th century. Today, boards made from compressed wood particles or fibers play an ever-greater role in the construction and furniture industries. In addition to its excellent properties as a building material, particleboard and fiberboard are increasingly being recognized for their qualities as design materials.
Especially when using such materials for design purposes, it becomes very important to be able to realistically reproduce their characteristic appearance in 3D visualizations. The subtle surface roughness of MDF or the anisotropic sheen on OSB – without textures that precisely capture all the various surface properties of each material, these are impossible to recreate.
Main Features
Textures
42 high-resolution fiberboard and particleboard textures
Real Anisotropy
Photometrically scanned anisotropy maps
Materials
Ready-to-use materials for Maxwell Render™
Details
Particle & Fiberboard Textures
This collection contains 20 high-res textures for various common fiberboard and particleboard materials. We have chosen materials that have an interesting and characteristic appearance, while also being very versatile in use, such as MDF, Hardboard, Softboard, OSB, chipboard, as well as cork.
Edge Textures
Also included are edge textures – saw-rough, as well as sanded – for MDF, Hardboard, OSB and chipboard.
Map Types
Beside a range of color variations, each texture primarily consists of a normal map and a reflectivity map – both essential for realistic rendering results. In addition, some materials also include an anisotropy map (e.g. the OSB materials). More on Anisotropy maps below.
Custom Color Templates
All materials are easily customized with the included template files for Adobe Photoshop™ – whether you need to adjust the color to match a specific reference material, or just want to explore this extra bit of creative freedom.
Anisotropy Maps
This collection contains a number of materials, whose appearance is strongly dependent on anisotropic reflections (mainly the OSB particle boards). We have therefore, for the first time, included anisotropy maps for those materials. Working with these can be a bit more involved and the process is strongly dependent on the rendering software you are using, as every software seems to interpret the angle information slightly differently.
Because anisotropy maps will play an important role in future products, we are very interested in customer feedback and would greatly appreciate if you could share your experience with us.
Anisotropy Reflections
You have seen the effect many times: Reflections and highlights that seem stretched and blurred depending on the direction in which a surface is viewed. This effect is caused by microscopic surface structure, often in form of tiny grooves or fibers. A prominent example is brushed metal. But many other real-world materials – synthetic and organic – show this effect to some degree. For some materials, this effect may be subtle. For others, their look is entirely dependent on anisotropic reflections (wood burl, carbon fiber, certain fabrics etc.).
How most 3D renderers handle anisotropic reflections
If your renderer supports anisotropic reflections, it will probably provide you with the option to specify two image maps to control the behavior of the effect. One to control how strongly anisotropic the reflections should be, i.e. how stretched-out reflections become, and another map to control the angle, i.e. the direction in which reflection are stretched. These are generally gray-scale maps, representing the strength as black=zero effect, white=max. effect, and the angle as black=0°, white=360°.
Why anisotropic reflections are rarely used
The main problem is that the image maps needed to control the effect are rather hard to come by. You cannot simply extract this information from a normal photograph. There are also no software tools that generate at least an approximation, like, for example, CrazyBump does for normal maps. While you’ll often get away with setting a fixed value for the effect strength, without a proper angle map you won’t get far.
Synthetic maps for synthetic materials
For some synthetic materials, synthetic angle maps can be created, e.g. via Photoshop. But for organic materials this would be unreasonably difficult, if not impossible.
