How to create wooden texture for table?

Question

I've been developing a flash game which is a top-view table top game. I'm trying to have a go at the art myself and need the table to look kind of smooth and not photo-realistic.

So far I tried to import a wooden texture to photoshop (which I have very little knowledge of) and apply a few filters to the texture but it ended up looking photo-realistic while the objects on top were clearly vector graphics - sleek and shiny.

I'd like to create a table-top that looks like the background table found here.

Any ideas how to do it?

Answer 1

Try this. It seems to me to fit the "woody but clearly not a photo" criterion.

In Photoshop set your background color to #d7ce9f (RGB 215, 206, 159).

Set the foreground to #ba9d7b (RGB 186, 157, 123).

Copy the background layer of a new document, and choose Filter > Render > Fibers. Set the variance to a low number (below 10) and the strength to around 25. Click "Randomize" until you see something that's reasonably close to what you want to end up with, then click OK.

Choose Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Set the angle to 90 (vertical) and a high value for distance.

Adjust Saturation to taste.

You end up with this:

To change the type of "wood" vary the colors and the amount of Saturation adjustment.

Answer 2

The sample you show looks photo-realistic to me. The reason you probably think it doesn't is not the wood texture itself, but the context: straight-on, no perspective, synthetic lighting etc.

There is a concept, usually applied to robotics and CG animations of humans, which is referred to as the "uncanny valley." It is basically a threshold where a hyper-realistic rendering is lacking just enough reality that it calls attention to itself. A lower fidelity or more stylized rendering actually avoids looking synthetic by being less realistic.

I would probably start by downloading a large wood texture or taking a photo of a wooden table using polarizing filters to eliminate gloss.

If you want to make it less realistic, try reducing the color set by saving a copy of the texture as a 64-color GIF with adaptive palette, or convert it to grayscale and then back to RGB, then colorize the result using overlays of colored layers.

Answer 3

I would suggest you to download high resolution texture and then use it in your project...

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Tutorials

• Realistic wooden texture
• tutorial on how to create wooden texture from photoshop
• different wood brush and tutorials

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Downloads

• High resolution wood texture
• download wood texture
• Sites to find good texture online

hope these link will help you

Answer 4

I would suggest scanning a piece of wood & tracing the bitmap to vector with a palette of only 2-3 colors. Next, experiment with cropping & scaling. Experiment with different colors with varying amounts of contrast between them. Good luck!