Guidance: Material choice for complex project

[sakumar9]

Hi,

I am trying to render a furniture product that was designed in SketchUp. You can find the image attached (furniture as well as wood panel image that I want to use).

To make the render look realistic, how should I chose material?
1. Should I create a new material for each panel? I might say this because in real world, no two panels will be exactly similar (solid wood). That way I can chose one texture and change some properties to make it different from others, still maintaining the same signature of the material.

2. If I do that,then maybe I need a separate material for each face?

3. Is this practical?

4. Any other suggestion?

[Will Gibbons]

Hi sakurmar9,

One thing I'd recommend is using the KeyShot procedural wood texture. If you're new to KeyShot, this will be a bit of an advanced approach, but will certainly be your best bet if you don't have unique textures for each piece of wood this model is made from.

I'd start with the plastic material type, and then for the diffuse color, apply the wood procedural texture and start dialing in the parameters to match your image sample. The procedural will create end grain and side grain where appropriate because it's a 3D procedural texture. If you want more control than that, use wood advanced procedural and go to town. Once this material is made, you can apply it to the entire model and you will see some variation due to the nature that it's a 3D procedural and the various pieces of your model aren't all the same size or shape. Finally, you can unlink any pieces that you wish to create further variation and apply various changes to each for the wood or grain color, noise, etc.

Hopefully that's enough to get you going.