@ 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)