Displacement Examples |
Example 1: Displacement vs Bump mapping
Example 4: Displacement on a character
Example 5: The Keep continuity option
Example 6: Subdivision displacement
This example shows the difference between bump mapping and displacement mapping. Notice the round outline of the sphere and its shadow in the case of bump mapping, and the deformed outline produced by the displacement:
The displacement map in this case is a 3d Cellular map; the 3D displacement method was used.
This example demonstrates the use of displacement mapping to clip away geometry from an object. The displacement map is a mix of a Noise map and a tiled Gradient ramp map; the dark regions of the map are clipped away:
In this case the displacement map was applied to an explicit mapping channel; 2D displacement was used in this case.
This is an example of a displaced landscape; 2D displacement was used; the displacement map is a Simbiont procedural texture.
This example shows displacement on a character; the map is a 3D cellular map, so the 3D displacement method is used.
Note that if the character is animated and the map is a 3d map using Object XYZ mapping, then the map will change relative to the object surface, since the surface itself changes its position in space. If you want to lock 3d procedural maps to the surfaces of animated objects, apply a UVW Map modifier with mode set to XYZ to UVW to the objects, and use Explicit mapping channel for the procedural map.
The Keep continuity option is useful for objects with disjoint normals on neighboring triangles, usually because of different smoothing groups. In the middle image below you can see the edge splits produced by disjoint normals. Using the Keep continuity option avoids this problem. This option will also help to produce a smoother result across material ID boundaries for objects with multi/subobject materials.
Here is an example of subdivision displacement (head model by Alexander Sokerov):
