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Making Wood, Stone, and Rock Textures With Adobe Photoshop
This tutorial will cover the creation of Wood, Stone, and Rock textures using Adobe Photoshop for use in any 3d application. Because of the nature of the filters used in these two tutorials, the goal is that we will end up with tile-able textures While I am going to be creating only a single variation on each technique, as you will hopefully see, an infinite amount of variations are possible with small shifts in color or size.

Making Wood

1. Start off with a 1024x1024 pixel image in Photoshop at 72 dpi.
   
   
2. Set your Foreground color to a brightness of 70 with no saturation and your background color to a brightness of 30, also with no saturation. With these values we are going to generate a Grain for our wood which will be colorized later.
   
   
3. Go to Filter--Texture--Grain
   
   
4. Set the Intensity high, the contrast low, and the Grain type to vertical. Hit OK.
   
   
5. Heres what the results will look like. The problem is, that close-up, the wood grain will look too regular, and also from far away it will seem to straight-line with not enough natural warp. We are going to fix these two problems in order.
   
   
6. First lets add a little variation to the grain close up. To preserve what we have already done, I will duplicate the background layer and edit the new “bakcground copy” layer. Right Click on “Background” in the layers Window and choose duplicate.
   
   
7. Now switch to this new layer and go to Filter--Brush Strokes--Angled Strokes
   
   
8. Alter the Direction Balance to your liking, The shorter the Stroke length, the more “Refined” your wood will feel. Set the Sharpness to your liking and hit OK.
   
   
9. Now lets add some waive to our wood using the Filter--Liquify function. With this we can create all sorts of knots, burls and curls.
   
   
10. Set your Brush size, and with it, move around the grain to your liking. The trick is not to touch the edges of the screen. Using the Offset Filter we will get to these outlying areas shortly. Hit OK when done.
    
    
11. Now lets see how this tiles. Since our image is 1024x1024, lets Offset the image halfway both vertically and horizontally, moving the corners to the center. Then we can Liquify them again. Go to Filter--Other Offset and Choose 512 for both sections, and set the Undefined Areas to “wrap around”.
    
    
12. With this, you now see that we have some straight lines in the center, ruining our grain-party. Lets use the liquify again to fix this. Repeat steps 9 and 10.
    
    
13. Heres how the image currently looks:
    
    
14. Since my wood grain has an intricate twirl to it, I am now going to give it a dark colorization to make it look “quite sophisticated”. Create a new layer in the layers window.
    
    
15. I set my Foreground color to (RGB) 175, 88, 35 and my Background to (RGB) 156,145,68. And I will choose Filter--Render--Clouds.
    
    
    
16. Now I will move this layer behind the backround copy, and set the blend mode for background copy to “Color Burn”.
    
    
17. Merge your layers and adjust your levels, and you should have something you enjoy as a wood texture!
    

Making Stone

1. We are going to start our stone by making a very large image and using a Render--Clouds Filter to generate a random variation. Since Clouds will generate at a set size, if we go larger and scale down in future step, we can make these seem less “wavy” and more “noisy”. This same idea will come into play later when we convert our simple stone into a more complex Rock texture. Make a new image, 10,000 by 10,000 pixels at 72 dpi.
   
   
2. Set your Foreground color to a brightness of 60 with no saturation and your background color to a brightness of 30, also with no saturation. With these values we are going to generate our Clouds. This may take a minute on slower machines.
   
   
3. Now lets scale this down to something usable, 1024x1024 pixels. Image--Image Size:
   
   
4. Choose View--Fit on Screen, and then lets make the edges of these clouds a little bit crisper with Filter-Pixelate--Facet.
   
   
5. Time to Duplicate the background layer, same as in the wood tutorial. On this new copy layer, lets add some Grain. Filter--Texture--Grain. This time, set the type to Clumped, Contrasty, or Speckled depending on Various effects you may wish to achieve. I have gone with Clumped and have set the Intensity and Contrast both fairly high. Hit Ok. This will be used to pick out bright and dark spots for our Stone’s flecking.
   
   
   
6. Choose the Magic Wand Tool or hit the hotkey “w”. Set the tool’s settings to be non-anti-aliased and turn off contiguous. Set the tolerance low.
   
   
7. Click on any area of the image to create a truly random selection
   
   
8. Create a new layer and name it “bright spots”. Switch to the paint bucket tool, hotkey “g” and fill the new layer with a bright gray. Choose Select--Deselect (Crtl-D), and here’s what you should have:
   
   
9. Now go back to the background copy layer, repeat steps 6-8 but make a new layer called “dark spots” and fill it with a dark gray. When done, hide or delete the background copy layer, it is no longer needed.
   
   
10. Time to make a colorizing layer. Make a new layer and fill it with a stone color of your choice. Put this layer below the two “spots” layers and above the background. I chose a fairly light beige.
    
    
11. Duplicate the background and move it to the top of your layers.
    
    
12. Set this Layer’s Blend mode and the blend mode of the Dark Spots layer both to Overlay.
    
    
13. Flatten your Image and adjust your Levels or Hue/Saturation to your liking and you should have an easy to use Stone.
    

Making Rock

1. We will start our Rock from the same stone that we just created. I consider the difference between a Stone texture and a Rock texture to be the feel of roughness on the surface. Stone to be smooth like something you’d find in your home, and Rock to be rough like a cliff wall. To roughen things up, lets again make a new layer and fill it with clouds. The contrast of your clouds, as well as the size of your image when you make them, AND whether or not you decide to add Filter--Noise--Add Noise... to them when you are done are all factors that could control roughness. I am going to make a really rough rock. My foreground is white, my background is black, and I choose Filter--Render--Clouds on that new layer.
   
   
2. Select the whole layer (Ctrl-A), Copy (Ctrl-C) and in the Channels window, Create a new Channel called Alpha1. Paste this selection there.
   
   
3. Make the Alpha Invisible
   
   
4. Return to the Layers Palette and Make Layer 1 Invisible as well.
   
   
5. Now lets apply this alpha as our lighting... Deselect the canvas (Ctrl-D), make sure you are on the background layer. and go to Filter--Render--Lighting Effects.
   
   
6. Set your Light Type as Directional and make sure the light is pointing straight down as you see here (not from the default lower right corner).
   
   
7. In the Texture Channel, Choose Alpha1 (our clouds) and set the value pretty high, making the feel be more Moutainous.
   
   
8. Adjust the other settings to your liking and hit OK.
   
   
9. And there’s your Rock