Alright, so I’ve been messing around with this idea of creating a “wood-textured shard” effect. I wasn’t really sure what I was aiming for at first, just had this vague image in my head of something that looked like a broken piece of wood, but kinda stylized.
Getting Started: The Basic Shape
First, I started by sketching out a few rough shapes on paper. Just some quick doodles to get the general idea of a shard. Nothing fancy, just trying to figure out what felt right. I ended up with a kinda jagged, triangular shape. That seemed like a good starting point.
Modeling the Shard
Next, I jumped into Blender. I’ve been using it for my models.I created a simple plane and then started extruding and shaping it to match my sketch. I added some loop cuts and moved vertices around until I had a 3D shard that I liked. It was pretty low-poly, which was intentional. I wanted to keep it simple for now.
Creating the Wood Texture
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I looked around for some free wood textures online. Just some basic stuff, nothing too detailed.
- I found a couple that looked decent and downloaded them.
- Then I went to work, and I UV unwrapped my shard model. This was probably the trickiest part, to be honest. I wanted to make sure the texture would wrap around the shard in a way that looked natural.
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I spent some time tweaking the UV map, making sure the seams were hidden as much as possible.
Putting it all Together
I created a new material in Blender and assigned my wood texture to it.
I played around with the material settings, adjusting the roughness and specular values to get the look I wanted.
I didn’t want it to be too shiny, more of a matte finish like aged wood.
Then the real work began, and played around it, until I get the final results.
Final Touches
Finally, I added a simple light to the scene and did a quick render. It actually looked pretty good! Better than I expected, to be honest.
It definitely has that “wood-textured shard” vibe I was going for. There’s still room for improvement, of course. I might play around with some more detailed textures or add some cracks and imperfections to the model. But for a first attempt, I’m pretty happy with it!
