Achieving a Wood Material in Vectors
Inkscape Tutorial
In the future, there will be more requests coming. These include animals, weapons and explosions. Right now, let’s focus on wood grain and the colours to chose for your wood material.


Starting with the Wood Material


Start with a rectangle and skew it.
Click on the object to bring up the rotation-deformers and choose one of the sides to move.
Note:
Holding CTRL while skewing gives you fixed angles.


Create a square and assign the base colour [usually the lightest colour you picked].
Add some lines with the straight lines tool or to match them perfectly use a duplicate of the square and convert it to a path, break the right hand nodes and delete them. Only the left line will remain.


Combine the shapes with the Path/ Union option (CTRL + +) and add more nodes to the lines. Select a row of nodes, convert the lines to curves and move them slightly to create an uneven pattern.
Break the lines apart via Paths/ Break Apart (Shift + CTRL + K) and variate the stroke width and shape.


The lines just change a little from on the next. Convert the lines to paths (Path/ Stroke to Path).
Use the colour picker and assign a colour to the line shapes.
Add more variation to the lines by adjusting the thickness of the lines.



There is no need to move every node as long as you achieve a less even pattern.
Blend the pattern in with the background by altering the fills alpha setting.

Creating Variations of the Wood Material



Using plain coloured backgrounds and keeping the top and bottom nodes unchanged allow the creation of seamless tiles (placing them next to each other they should connect without visible breaks).
Adding gradient shading, gloss and highlight shapes works well when illustrating a set piece of furniture, flooring or even as a tree bark pattern.


Here is a sample of a game I am working on. I used the elements and this technique the UI panels as well.


Real nice! Really useful to know how to create one's own materials!
coool to make signs boards
Great tutorials! You make everything look so easy. I especially like the background for that level. If you are looking for suggestions on future articles, perhaps a tutorial on creating game backgrounds. It would be interesting to see how to create these amazing backgrounds with the lighting effects.
This is great. You can do stuff with vectors that I never thought of.
nice tutorial as always, you make it look so easy.. +1 for richard's suggestions :)
The background looks amazing!, it's very nice how the material fits the rest of the scene, I mean, it has the same style, that feature seems hard to achieve. Thanks for sharing.
Great tutorial. Can you post a detailed tutorial on seamless texture and tiles? Thanks!
I really love your tutorials, thanks so much for providing them. I had no idea what was possible for non-artistic programmers like myself!
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Hello Chris, I've been trying for a whole day to make this wooden texture, but when I create squares and delete right nods the square turns into a part of circle and I can't change that. Could you help out a bit?
Did you turn the box to a path first. You can also just use the pen tool and draw a line – holding CTRL will snap it straight and if you add the snapp to objects you can align the nodes to match the top and bottom of the background square.
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If I turn a box into a path and delete right nods it simply dissapears. Lines work good for me, but I'm a stubborn and I want to know how to do the same with the squares
The fill should disappear as you no longer have a closed object but you should retain the two nodes on the left with the line connecting them – that can be turned into stroke.
Maybe add the stroke before deleting the nodes to make sure it's visible.
Very informative post ….Thanks for sharing. Learned a lot of things about trust flow and citation flow. Keep up the good work.
Awesome port bro, you really explained everything neatly. actually, i am new and thus was eager to know more about TF and CF, thanks to your providing such an awesome post