I would like to make wood shaders. Can Blender do that or is there a plugin for blender that does that? Not a mapped texture but a generated shader that one can control its characteristics? (I can probably keep this forum from drying up on my own just with my dumb questions)

Sure. Add A material then add a texture. Hit F6 to get to the textures buttons and from the dropdown menu under texture type select wood. then fiddle with the parameters till you get the grain the way you like. There are eight texture channels that you can use to overlay grains, clouds to break up solid color, adjust alpha and such. Hit F5 to get back to the materials section and adjust it to your mapping preferences. The old Blender 2.0 guide had a short tutorial on how to do this. I'm not sure if it's in the 2.3 Guide but I'll check. Alot of the old tuts were carried over into the new guide. Have fun~

its in the new one too, and it does a good job at imitating wood lol

Please 'scuse my 3D newbness, but what in teh heck is a shader? haha

Thank you. I don't do keystrokes much. More of a mouse kind of guy but with your help I discovered the button that gets me the same place. I guess I misused the term shader.Should have been material.

hello, here is a place when you can find a lot of procederal materials for blender. http://www.geocities.com/pollythesheep/matlib_index.html you can study them to see how they was " built".

Thanks, I wasn't having much luck with doing it from scratch.