Adding knots

With the warp grain done, I'm ready to add knots if needed. Knots are a nice to have; we don't always need them, but they can add character in a wood map. If we're doing more straight grain pieces, like tools, we may not want to add too many knots. Knots, however, look really good in furniture. I'll show the process on them and you have the option of adding them in or not. To start, I'll go back in the Liquify tool, choosing Filter > Liquify. Now in Liquify tool, instead of doing giant broad strokes, we want to work in more localized areas.

I'll press B to go back to the Bloat tool, I'll take the Brush Size way down, probably in the 200 range is just fine, and again, Density and Pressure are very low. First I'll start to bloat open areas for knots where the wood grain has a little bit of a wave like this. I may want to bring up the Brush Size a little bit; I'll start to add in local places for knots, being careful again not to make giant zigzags in the wood. I'll add a few in and then come back and move them around a little bit.

With my knot spaces in place, now I'll switch over to the Twirl tool. In the Twirl tool, zooming in on the knots by using the Zoom tool, I'm going to twirl in a knot structure. I'll take the Brush Size way down, and again, Pressure and Rate are very low. With twirl, what we really need is a roundness in here. It doesn't even have to be a complete knot as much as a spot that we recognize as such. Remember that this is a map we're going to take pieces out of for wood.

I'll press Ctrl+0 to zoom out. We can see that I have a knot-like structure in that one place and I'm ready to do other knots in other places. We perceive it as a knot even though if we look closely, it's really more of a smudge. I'll zoom in on the next bloated area, press C to switch to my Twirl tool, and grab a little bit of the darkness and twirl it in. What we want to avoid is twirling forever, getting us endless loops and pixelated circles. Really what we're after is some kind of oblong or off looking ring structure.

I'll continue to zoom in on my knots and twirl them in and it's perfectly fine in this to have incomplete knots in places, where they're more of a smudge that could have been a knot farther along. It's also fine to have light areas for knots that cross dark grain. What we're after here is the structure we recognize in the wood, not necessarily a picture-perfect depiction of it. Remember also, we're going to take this and probably upsize or downsize it and fit it onto an unwrap, and so as long as our structure is pretty good, this will work nicely.

I'll click OK when I'm done and give it a minute to return that liquefied result. My wood grain is ready. I've got tonal variation and knots, and also areas around the knots that the grain has been distorted. Now I'm ready to finally add color into this and use it as part of a map.