Now that all the sculpting and maps have been finished, I was able to move onto creating my birch bark…. This brought with it many challenges.
I searched and searched online for a silver birch texture but found nothing available to me. Very few people had created it, and none of those shared it. I has a substance from substance share for a trunk, which had great reviews, plus horizontal ridges which fit the Birch bark perfectly. I decided to use this as the base to my bark.
I adjusted the substance with many tweaks to reach this point, but it still doesn’t look anything like silver birch bark. It is important to remember that in home décor, birch branches are often treated to make them appear more white, grey, or silver as these colours are often preferred.
I then added more lines through normal detail, with an alpha brush to add inverted ‘scratches’. This gave the bark much more depth.
I left the bark at this point, as I was running out of ideas of how to make this more Birch-like, and the trunks as they were looked okay. This was not the desired effect though.
A little later, I had an idea after remembering a substance I had seen on substance share- ‘wood painted’. I applied this over the top, and adjusted many levels to create a much more birch-like material.
After a few more corrections to various materials, I decided I was happy with this birch material, and I’m very pleased I didn’t just give up when I couldn’t find a way to create what I had envisaged.