# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Procedural Textures

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**Procedural Textures**

Texturing objects can be broken down into two categories: procedural and
image texturing. Procedural texturing makes use of mathematical formulas
to generate textures. This is nice because it can be used to make
relatively nice looking textures without external images which are very
temperamental where you put them. Procedural Textures are all stored in
the .blend file. These textures are obviously generated within Blender
itself. Image texturing uses images created or captured outside of
Blender, either from an image manipulation program such as the
Paint.NET, GIMP or Photoshop, or captured on a camera. We have already
learned about image texturing, so let\'s move on to procedural
texturing.

**Current Procedural Textures**

Blender currently supports many procedural textures, including: Clouds,
Marble, Stucci, Wood, Magic, Blend, Noise, Musgrave, Voronoi and
DistortedNoise.

## A Simple Wood Texture

Let\'s define a simple wood texture:

-   Start a new Blender document containing the default cube.
-   Select the cube (and nothing else).
-   In the Properties window, go to the World tab
    ![](Blender255WorldContextButton.png "Blender255WorldContextButton.png")
    and turn on Environment Lighting (you can leave its default energy
    at 1.0).
-   Go to the Materials tab
    ![](Blender255MaterialContextButton.png "Blender255MaterialContextButton.png"),
    and rename the default \"Material\" to \"Wood Material\".
    Alternatively, delete the default material using the X to the right
    of the name field and add a new material.

Let\'s add some color and texture. You can see the results at any time
by pressing F12 to re-render the scene.

Start by painting the cube a base color using the Wood Material\'s
\"diffuse\" color:

-   In the "Material" tab,
-   Scroll down to the "Diffuse" properties panel and choose a darker
    brown color e.g. #A57E3F.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV> for where brown fits in
the color wheel.

Next, let\'s add a texture to give the material some highlights.

-   Switch to the "Texture" properties tab
    ![](Blender259_Texture_Button.png "Blender259_Texture_Button.png"),
    and again rename the default \"Tex\" to \"Wood Texture\" or create a
    new texture. Notice at the very top of the \"Texture\" tab \"Cube \>
    Wood Material \> Wood Texture\"
-   Change the Type of the material to "Wood" using the pop-up menu.

The texture sample will show parallel alternating black and white bars
that don't look very woody at all. Never fear! The black regions will be
the material\'s base \"diffuse\" color. The white regions are like
\"highlights\" that will be painted over the base.

Let\'s make some improvements to the texture:

-   While still in the "Textures" tab,
-   Scroll to the "Wood" properties panel that appears, change the
    waveform from "Sine" to "Saw".
-   In the next row of buttons down, change the type from the default
    "Bands" to "Ring Noise".
-   Increase the Noise Size to 1.0.

Now the texture sample should show something resembling wavy tree-rings.
If you hit F12 to render now, you will see these rings covering your
cube, except a) the colour is wrong, and b) normal wood patterns aren\'t
so nearly circular.

To make the pattern more elongated:

-   Scroll to the "Mapping" properties panel,
-   Change the Size X value to 2.0 and Y to 0.4. This squishes the
    pattern down along the X-axis, and stretches it out along the
    Y-axis, giving the elliptical tree-ring shapes you commonly see on
    wood planks and boards.

Hit F12 to render again, and the shape of the texture should be looking
a lot more woody now.

The final step is to color the highlights in the texture:

-   In the "Textures" tab,
-   Scroll to the "Influence" properties panel further down,
-   Click on the color swatch, and choose a nice brown colour.

For a nicer effect, I chose a very light brown e.g. #DEB887.

The result should look very woody indeed!

![](Blender259WoodTextureSample.png "Blender259WoodTextureSample.png")

-   Remember that you need to Render to see the wood grain on your
    object.

