Hi! i am currently doing a bamboo project and have no idea how to make the pipes look like bamboo with real life textures. tried to search online but got no answers. Got nothing when i searched up bamboo PBR materials. Please help me 
You’ll 1) Need really good bamboo texture/material (probably the hardest part). You’ll probably need multiple textures if you want photo-realism. And 2) You’ll likely need to do some manual texture mapping. It doesn’t take too long. In this file I had to play with the scales and rotations a little.
Surface mapping seems to be working best for me. And then playing with the scales and rotations. You’ll be able to just match some mapping which speeds things up, but lots of stocks will need their own settings.
Bamboo Test.3dm (551.8 KB)
A while back I was thinking of a way to create actual bamboo stocks, like the shape itself would actually have nodes. That would be cool!!
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One alternative way of considering the problem is that if this is the main structure, to consider physically modelling the bamboo.
I tried to model a single segment here, and literally everything else is this single segment, flowed along a single curve, then randomly scattered into a scene.
It’s really not a pretty object, but you can see the approach I have done in the single piece of bamboo I have attached here. There’s a bit of displacement to aid the shadowing and prevent the purity of the cylinder showing.
All of the materials are internal to Rhino 8. You can see I have used the Rhino preocedural wood, which mostly works (I am not convinced it preserves UV under flow at all). But with a specific ratio in the UV, you get that fine vertical grain from bamboo, to use as both a colour map and a bump map.
It’s not designed for close viewing, but may work at the large object scale you are considering. When flowing, I think that you should flow a mesh representation of the object, rather than the NURBS object, using ExtractRenderMesh (See RH-61618).
I hope it helps a little.
BambooSinglePart.3dm (355.6 KB)
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Thank you so much!
Thank you!!
Something else to try if you have (lots!!) of time to kill:
This was something I had been planning in my head for a while. It’s a little harder to pull off than I thought and this is what I achieved with the available time.
First I model a surface that will be used to create my texture maps:
I used the “testshownormalmap” command to get the normal map:
I make sure the corners are showing so I can use as reference points in my paint program (paint.net lol). I’m going to “view” and “capture”. I’m using Arctic mode to get my AO map. And also creating basic plaster materials just to use as a start for a color map. I’ll would share more details but given I’m using Paint.net compared to most people with photoshop…
The next part I’m struggling with a bit: Displacement. I don’t even know what all the settings do. And I could probably create a more realistic looking texture that is also friendlier towards the mesh generation.
Note that I had to use the surface only for the chute on the left. For some reason the displacement mapping rotated 90d and wouldn’t change no matter what. Polysurfaces are a little unpredictable unfortunately.
This could be a good method but you’d need to be a texture wizard and might need lots of H.P.. My 4070 laptop was just starting to throttle up when I finished.
bamboo texture test 1.3dm (287.7 KB)
Bamboo Test 2.3dm (756.7 KB)
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didn’t know rendering a bamboo would be this hard! thanks for the replies, i’m going to try it!