Realistic Wood Textures...

[alexoctagon]

I've got a job coming up where I need to very realistically texture some
wooden handles for things like chisels etc for a company that actually does
the lathing of the handles.

So far in my work I've always got away with wrapping a wood texture around
things like this, but because the emphasis is on the wood now, it has to
look as though the wood grain is running all the way through, hence I
thought about using fractals. I've had a quick look at LW's wood fractal but
so far haven't produced anything any good. I've had a look and seen that
there are simbient and IFW textures available which I'll have to go through,
are there any other fractals that I'm missing?

Another way might be to photograph a texture from a lathed object to wrap around, although that would be rather tricky!!

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks, Alex

[Silkrooster]

So far this is the best procedurals for wood that I have seen.Darkling (http://www.darksim.com/html/simbiont.html) Which you had mentioned. If you goto thier web site you can view the wood textures.
Silk

[Rory_L]

Spiral Graphics` Wood Workshop is a free procedural tiling texture generator tailored to making woody paterns. It`s resolution independent too. Get it via Flay.

It`s good. Honest :) You can also get it to make brick walls!

R

[Silkrooster]

A couple more procedural programs I forgot about. The first is available for free at http://www.allegorithmic.com/v2/zone_desc.htm This plugin is a Photoshop plug in to create textures. I have tried this plug in with Corel Photo-Paint 12 and Micrografx Picture Publisher 8. Both programs could use this plug in.
The other program is from Corel, it is Corel Texture 8. So far that is only version I know of that had the texture program, it is not in the ver 12 of Corel Draw.
Silk