I am using blender for 3D printing, and was hoping there was an easy way to export a mesh with a cycles/node texture displacement.
Right now, I’m either confined to Blender’s original (limited) procedural textures, or forced to go through the process of rendering cycles displacements/texture bump maps, then re-applying via displacement modifier with UV. Every time I want to tweak the texture, I have to redo the process, which isn’t ideal.
I’ve tried converting the texture used by the displacement modifier to use nodes, but it just breaks, and exporting with true displacement on just gives the pre-render object.
I would have thought that a displacement modifier is the only way to do displacement for 3D printing. It may be possible for the displacement to be applied during the export process … what format do you export to?
STL typically. Displacement modifier is the route I am currently going. I guess my hope is that there is some way to use texture nodes directly with the displacement modifier, or that I can export a mesh with cycles-calculated true displacement.
The advantage of using a displacement modifier, of course, is you can see what it’s doing in solid or textured view. Micro-displacement is cool, but you can only see it’s results in a render. There may be an addon that converts cycles displacement into a displacement modifier…