Tutorials by Danny Mcauliffe ..............

Displacement Mapping

Displacement mapping is a powerful technique for adding detail to three dimensional
objects and scenes. While bump mapping gives the appearance of increased surface
complexity, displacement mapping actually adds surface complexity resulting in correct
silhouettes and no parallax errors.

A major benefit of displacement mapping is the ability to use it for both adding
surface detail to a model and for creating the model itself. For example the detail
added to the surface of a crocodile’s skin could be done with displacement mapping
or all the detail required to model a piece of terrain can be stored in a displacement
map and a flat plane used for the base surface.

Simple Displacement Tutorial

This is not a 3Dmax tutorial so you should know the basics

but if not then theres always F1 on your keyboard

Make a flat plane 330 by 140

make sure you turn up the mesh so it looks something like the picture

above.

Next add a displace modifer

right click and download the picture below then add it to the Bitmap slot

of the displacement modifer

make sure you tick the Luminance center box

set the Displacement strength so you start to see

the effect you should see something like the pic bellow

Try adding a noise map or mixxing more than one map ,you can get some great effects

The one drawback of this method is that you need a high density mesh for high detail and this can increase render time.I use this method with another method of displacement and that is to displace the mesh at rendertime you can do this in 3Dmax using the Mentalray renderer. so pick Mentelray as you renderer in render settings

select the render tab and copy the displacement settings

from the picture below or download the rps file by clicking on the picture

Next open up the Material editor and assign slot one to your plane

right click and download the picture below then add it to the displacement channel

Set the level to 4 or 5 ,click the show map button

so you can see how the map sits on the plane

render out the scene and you should have somthing like the picture below

so you can see from all of this you can use a displacement modifer on a lowres mesh and a hires displacement modifer at rendertime . you could just use the mentalray displacement on its own but I find you have more control using two maps

thats the end of this I hope it helped

and remember the secret to using this effect is in the maps

as you will see if you have a look at my Desert stone tutorial

© Danny Mcauliffe 2007