Tutorial: How to make Herringbone Parquet pattern in Vray Max

Betrand aka. BB3 shared this tutorial at Chaos Group and his Site.  

A few people got back to me following my recent Tolix chair post to enquire about the parquet. Normally, I would use the Floor Generator plugin from cg-source to create all sorts of parquets. But this won’t do for the herringbone type. Below is a step-by-step tutorial about how I created a slightly simplified version of the parquet you can see in the Tolix images (the actual parquet was slightly more complex but ended up being needlessly high-poly, making it impractical for most scenes). The images below should be self-explanatory, but do not hesitate to ask if anything isn’t clear.

You can go through the tutorial using your own timber plank maps or those from cg-source. For a true vintage look, you can purchase the plank textures I’m using here. For those of you who, like me, don’t want to go through the herringbone modelling phase every single time, this product includes very high-resolution, seamlessly tileable maps for entire parquets (as opposed to individual planks). These come in two flavours: herringbone and traditional english style.

Now the GOOD NEWS is that I’m also offering completely free versions of these parquet maps at 2K resolution (down from the 5k and 4k commercial ones). These won’t do for extreme close-ups but they should work in many situations. I’m also giving away the 3ds Max 2010 sample scene for this tutorial, which includes all the Vray 2 shaders for the different parquet flavours. You will find these freebies in the promotional download section of the product page here. Note that you need a TS account to download these and that you will need the free “MultiTexture” plugin and “Unique Material ID” scripts from cg-source in order to complete the tut and open the Max scene.