After a short break and heaps of interruptions plodding on through this course. Learning lots still. Not very happy with my beams texture. As I didn’t want to pay for a texture for my wood grain I made a couple of textures in Krita and tried applying as a brush in Blender with average results. I think my problem is that I needed to make an alpha file to do this.
Really learning lots about using nodes in textures and finally some of it is starting to make more sense not just the basic maps. I did successfully change the characteristics of the wood to make it darker. I also like how you can use one texture if stuck and make a normal and roughness map. This is particularly good for me because I mainly want to render scenes in Blender.
I intend doing the texture painting course after this to hone up on that and get the basics down.