Bercon Wood Map Examples

[3dwannab]

Hi All,

I intend to post some working examples as and when I do them on Bercons wood maps as the literature is sort of not the best and only shows one example.

With this example it's a light Oak texture. There's no post work done as this was only an re-worked / modelled asset from the Carl Hansen Chair collection. http://www.carlhansen.com/products/chairs/ch56-ch58/

Important Info:

• Render 03 is Final.
• The Object IDs where randomly spread throughout the scene with a nice little script from http://www.tepavicharov.com/?p=79. I manually made sure the ID's of the chair legs were 1,2,3 & 4 to match that of the Corona Multimap which was set to Object GBuffer ID.
• C1,C2,C3,C4 Color Correction maps are there to change the contrast, Gamma Hue of the maps. This you can play with yourself.
• Final renderings below and screen-shot examples with Mat.
• The angle of the Bercon Wood mat was such to match that of the way the wood grain was going in the actual piece.
• I didn't upload the mat file as you don't learn as good that way ;)
• With Render 02 it was just the original Bercon Map I started with and Render 03 was Changed in the output section of the Bercon Wood map to give it a lighter look and closer to the Original Piece.
• Filter of .1 to .2 works best for Bercon Wood Maps I feel.
• The Bump, Reflect and ReflG maps are just a less contrasty version of the Bercon Map piped into an Output Map. I wanted to give the feeling of raw wood which was sanded down with fine sandpaper. An IOR of 3.0 done the trick here.

Any questions feel free to ask..
ALSO PLEASE FEEL FREE TO POST YOUR EXAMPLES HERE GUYS n GALS

[-Ben-Battler-]

Thanks for sharing your workflow. I am impressed that you can actually use this map to achieve photorealistic results. I always gave it a wide berth, remembering my trials and fails with the standard Max wood texture. This one seems to be better.

But still, I avoid Bercon Maps where I can since it always causes Max to crash when using it with IR and tweaking parameters in the SME... Thats sad because it is such a powerful tool!

I hope someday one competent, good soul will have pity with those abandoned Bercon Maps and is going to fix the errors and recompile them for good :)

[3dwannab]

Thank you. I've never had any problems so far with Bercon maps crashing IR. The 2015 recompile of the maps was much better than beforehand I feel. All that is missing from these maps is a knot feature. That would make my day!

[steyin]

Great stuff here. The existing documentation on BM is so limited and pretty confusing, or could at least use more depth. I finally have figured out the damn tile map for bricks and such, and now it takes me little to no time to get brick mats setup. I played with wood a little but never really had to use it, but I should start. Thanks for this.

[3dwannab]

@ steyin. True dat... ;] I need to look at those too sometime.

Next up I've tried a beech wood. it's slightly more complex than the Oak but here goes.  Comments and criticism welcome.

With this one I took in the actual bitmap I was trying to get close to and fired up IR and tweaked the values to get the final result. It's impossible to achieve a good look otherwise.


One problem I came across was the mapping on the handle. I tried to (see Bercon Mapping Problem.jpg) put this map (Bercon Mapping Map) from the Bercon Wood Map to a Corona-Multi Map (on Object GBuffer setting again) but It wouldn't work. It worked with a normal bitmap to rotate the textures but not the Bercon Wood One. I don't know if any of you had success with this?

Anyway, I got round the solution but rotating the handle on a 90deg X axis, then adding an xForm modifier on that as I didn't want to collapse the stack and then rotating the object 90 deg back again so the texture on the handle would map correctly. See the .mat file attached or screenshots for the Bercon Map Settings and try it for yourselves.

Once the material is set-up is quite easy to change colours to give a whole new look. See the darker coloured example.

That Bercon Material is then in a blend with a mirror material with 85 value in reflect slot and the ThinFilm Texmap in the Mask (www.sigerstudio.eu/shop/3ds-max/sigertexmap-thinfilm/) with IOR values of 1.0 external (Never change this) 1.4 Film, 1.6 Internal and a noise map to drive the thickness. You could barely even see that but there you go :) But it gives that lacquered type effect I was after. You may notice a colour variation on the wood which is achieved with the Corona Multi-mop. Look up the strawberry tutorial on here which shows how this is achieved with the leaves. Around the 25min onwards mark. (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=8782.0)

[3dwannab]

Another example. Much the same as first only less tiling on X axis to make the grain less apparent plus other smaller tweaks to the settings. See screen-shots for values.

[Malor]

Oh wow! This is pretty awesome. How time consuming is this workflow? Is it worth it, to construct wood this way when on a job?

[3dwannab]

Thanks. Yeah, the initial learning is sort of steep but so isn't 3ds max. Just use the same values as I've got here and use the color picker in max to get the colors. When using the colour picker to pick outside 3ds max UI.

- Click it
- Still inside max UI click and hold and drag to your browser where my examples are and let go of the picker.

This way you get a pretty accurate starting point.

My advice is to follow the examples. Use IR. And also keep the mapping type to object but affect the pivot point.

How you do this is by telling max what direction the wood has been manufactured (like in real life)

First have all the objects xforms reset
Have all the rotations in the mapping to zero.
Isolate your first piece of timber.
Turn on IR
With each piece use the rotation in the mapping to figure out what angle the grain looks natural
Take note of the value in the X,Y,Z rotation and then XERO out those values once you're happy
Rotate the object those values in the opposite rotation (so X 90 will rotate the object -90 in the X-axis)
Xform the object
Rotate back to the original orientation.

Then to add variation rotate and offset in the mapping section to your desired amount.

[Malor]

Thanks alot. This workflow can be amazing for rare sorts of wood.

[JoeVallard]

Did you download Bercon Noise from the link here on corona?

Max crashes everytime I change any of the variance settings. Would love to experiment with bercon wood.

[3dwannab]

2014 is buggy and crashes as there was never a recompile done for it, only the 2013 one worked which caused problems like you say.

2015 is fine with the one I have which is posted on the official BM website. Recompile done by Vlado: http://www.ylilammi.com/2014/05/berconmaps-for-3dsmax-2015/

Not sure about 2016.

[steyin]

2014 is buggy and crashes as there was never a recompile done for it, only the 2013 one worked which caused problems like you say.

2015 is fine with the one I have which is posted on the official BM website. Recompile done by Vlado: http://www.ylilammi.com/2014/05/berconmaps-for-3dsmax-2015/

Not sure about 2016.

I thought there was a recompile for 2014? I've been using them with no issues, at least so far...

[3dwannab]

You're using Max 2013 file I'd say. Check your plugins folder. It should have the year appended to the file. Looked hi and low for 2014. But 2013 had a major bug.

Open a fresh scene. Use wood map and under the mapping section toggle object checkbox on and off. Boom. Crash.

[steyin]

You're using Max 2013 file I'd say. Check your plugins folder. It should have the year appended to the file. Looked hi and low for 2014. But 2013 had a major bug.

Open a fresh scene. Use wood map and under the mapping section toggle object checkbox on and off. Boom. Crash.

I'm running Max Design 2014. Just tried this, no crash. Applied the mat to a box, checked the object tick box on and off, no issues.


I'm using a recompile of the 2013 3.03 Berconmaps, date on the files is from April 2012.