Blender materials · free

SF Wood.

Seven procedural wood materials for Blender — walnut, oak, cherry, pine, ebony, varnished walnut and weathered grey — all built from one generator, so every control is a slider. It's a solid volume, not a texture wrapped round the outside: cut a face and it shows real end grain. Works in EEVEE and Cycles from the same material, with no image textures and no AI.

Start here, not with the material theory. The single most common question is "where did it go?" — the answer is the Asset Browser, and it needs one bit of setup the first time. Do section 01 and the rest is dragging.

01Get it into Blender

Two ways in. The first is the proper one and takes about thirty seconds; the second is the shortcut if you just want the material in this file and don't care about a library.

Unzip it

both routes

Unzip SF-Wood-Free-Pack.zip somewhere you'll keep it — not your Downloads folder, since Blender is going to point at this folder from now on. Something like Documents/Blender/Assets/SF-Wood/.

Register it once

route A · recommended

Edit → Preferences → File Paths → Asset Libraries → + (the plus button), then pick the unzipped folder — the folder, not the .blend inside it. Give it a name if you like. Close Preferences; Blender remembers this forever.

Open an Asset Browser

route A

Change any editor to Asset Browser (the editor-type dropdown in the corner of any area — the little grid icon), then pick your library from the dropdown at the top-left. You'll see seven bowls under Starting Frame → Wood.

Quickest way to get one: split the timeline at the bottom of the default layout and switch it to Asset Browser. You don't need a fancy workspace.

Or skip all that

route B · fastest

File → Append → browse into SF_Wood_FREE_v1.blend → Material → pick the wood you want. It lands in the current file and you assign it in the Material Properties tab like any other material.

Route B is per-file. Route A means every future project already has them.

02Put it on something

Drag it on

From the Asset Browser, drag a wood straight onto your object in the 3D viewport. That's the whole interaction. Switch the viewport to Material Preview or Rendered (the sphere icons, top-right of the viewport) to see it.

Scale matters

The grain is sized in real-world units, so a 2 m object shows wider rings than a 2 cm one — which is correct, and usually what you want. If your object was modelled at the wrong scale the grain will look off; either fix the scale (Ctrl-A → Scale) or just turn the Scale slider until it reads right.

03The part that makes it worth having

This is the difference between a material you own and an image you downloaded: every control is exposed. Select the object, go to the Shading tab, and click the SF_Wood group node. The whole panel is sliders.

The grain

  • Ring Scale
  • Ring Contrast
  • Pith Offset
  • Log Stretch
  • Fibre Stretch
  • Fibre Roughness

Pith Offset is the fun one — it moves the centre of the log relative to your object, which changes how the rings arc across a face. Small changes read as "a different board".

Knots

  • Knot Amount
  • Knot Size
  • Knot Depth

Knots deflect the surrounding grain the way a real knot does, rather than being a dark spot painted on top. Turn Knot Amount to 0 for clean, furniture-grade stock.

Colour & finish

  • Base Colour
  • Ring Colour
  • Roughness
  • Coat Weight
  • Coat Roughness
  • Colour Variation

Raise Coat Weight for a varnish or lacquer. That plus a colour change is most of how the seven presets differ from each other — so making an eighth is a two-minute job.

Every slider reads higher = more. No inverted controls, no "0.5 is neutral" surprises. If you want more of a thing, turn it up.

04The seven

Same bowl, same light, same generator — only the numbers change.

Walnut
Walnut
Oak
Oak
Cherry
Cherry
Pine
Pine
Ebony
Ebony
Varnished walnut
Varnished walnut
Weathered grey
Weathered grey

05Wear, included on purpose

The pack also carries a shared node group called SF_Imperfectionsscratches, dust, smudges and micro-surface. It's in the free build deliberately: clean wood is easy, and wear is the part that actually teaches you what procedural materials can do. Open any wood in the Shading tab and you'll find it in the graph; the masks are reusable on anything, not just these woods.

06Good to know

Blender version

Needs Blender 5.2 or newer — the file is saved by 5.2 and will not open in 4.x, including 4.2 LTS. Built and verified in 5.2.

Both engines

One material, identical in EEVEE and Cycles — nothing in the graph is Cycles-only, so there's no second version to keep track of.

Nothing to trust us with

100% procedural — no image textures, no scans, no AI, nothing that phones home. That's also why the whole pack is under two megabytes.

What you can do with it

Render whatever you like, commercially or not, and sell the result. The only thing off the table is repackaging the materials themselves and redistributing them as your own pack.

$Get SF Wood

free · 1.8 MB · Blender 5.2+ · EEVEE and Cycles

SF Wood is free.

One email unlocks it — which also puts you on the newsletter, where new tools and packs get announced. Then it's yours, on your machine, forever.

Get SF Wood free → ← Back to the guide
Starting Frame. — the guide · startingframe.com
SF Wood · seven woods from one generator, every control a slider.