How to Render Wood in KeyShot

by Will Gibbons | Last Updated: October 7, 2019 •  2 min read

KeyShot Tutorials » Rendering

Wood materials can be challenging

If you’ve ever wondered how to render wood in a realistic way, you’re not alone. Wood is organic and random, but with patterns. Therefore, wood can be a tricky material to create in KeyShot. Should you use image-based textures or go with a procedural approach? It needs to have enough detail to look realistic.

Another challenge is end grain. Even if you’re able to source some nice, high-resolution textures of wood, you’ll need a matching end-grain image. This is tough because nobody bothers to capture end-grain images.

So, we’ll take a procedural approach to render wood. While KeyShot has some nice base materials to get you started with creating wood, they often leave something to be desired. We’ll solve this using the material graph which offers plenty of room to customize the look.

How to render wood step-by-step in KeyShot

This tutorial will show you how to render wood in KeyShot’s material graph. While the material graph can be intimidating for first-time users, I take an easy approach.

Procedural is a fancy word that means it’s dynamic. Which is great because, you get to specify things like color, shape, randomness and more. On the other hand, with an image-based texture, you’re mostly stuck with how it looks.

Therefore, using a procedural material, you can create different kinds of woods from the same material. For example, you cauld create Oak, Pine, Walnut and more! So, with the flexibility of this tool, you should be able to customize your wood material to your heart’s desire. And the procedural wood material in KeyShot also takes care of end grain, which makes it even better!

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to

• Import a 3D model
• Change the environment
• Use the material graph
• Customize the wood advanced material
• Add knots
• Adjust variation in grain and color
• Add utility nodes
• Use the color gradient node
• Apply roughness maps
• Add displacement
• Use physical lights

Free project files include

• 3D device model (STP)
• Reference (JPG)

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Will Gibbons is an industrial designer-turned rendering specialist. He's trained and worked with some of today's most recognizable brands and now is focused on creating the best product visualization content on the internet.