Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Procedural Textures
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Procedural Textures
Texturing objects can be broken down into two categories: procedural and image texturing. Procedural texturing makes use of mathematical formulas to generate textures. This is nice because it can be used to make relatively nice looking textures without external images which are very temperamental where you put them. Procedural Textures are all stored in the .blend file. These textures are obviously generated within Blender itself. Image texturing uses images created or captured outside of Blender, either from an image manipulation program such as the Paint.NET, GIMP or Photoshop, or captured on a camera. We have already learned about image texturing, so let's move on to procedural texturing.
Current Procedural Textures
Blender currently supports many procedural textures, including: Clouds, Marble, Stucci, Wood, Magic, Blend, Noise, Musgrave, Voronoi and DistortedNoise.
[edit] A Simple Wood Texture
Normally you have to assign a material for a new object. The default cube has already a material assigned to it. So we can directly proceed and give it a texture. In the Properties window, click on the “Texture” button 
. On a new object you have to create a texture first as well. The default cube already has a texture assigned. Under “Type”, click on the button “None”. In the “Texture Type” popup menu that appears, select “Wood”. The texture sample will show parallel alternating black and white bars that don’t look very woody at all. But never fear.
In the “Wood” properties panel that appears, change the waveform from “Sine” to “Saw”. In the next row of buttons down, change the type from the default “Bands” to “RingNoise”. Increase the NoiseSize to 1.0. Now the texture sample should show something resembling wavy tree-rings. If you hit F12 to render now, you will see these rings covering your cube, except a) the colour is wrong, and b) normal wood patterns aren’t so nearly circular.
To make the pattern more elongated, go to the “Mapping” properties panel, change the Size X value to 2.0 and Y to 0.4. Hit F12 to render again, and the shape of the texture should be looking a lot more woody now.
To fix the colour, go to the “Influence” properties panel further down, click on the colour swatch, and choose a nice brown colour. For a nicer effect, I chose a very light brown. Switch to “Material”, go to the “Diffuse” properties panel and choose a darker brown color. The result looked very woody indeed:
