Displacement mapping or an alternative.

Support Basics & Interface
1

Displacement mapping is very limited in what it can do.
I am sure it is used for a specific purpose, however I can’t see it being accurate for any applications.

anyways, on to my question.

is there a tool, that can use textures to generate vertices?
for example, say you have some text you want engraved into an object, you really only have a few choices.
use displacement mapping, (really inaccurate even with a high vert count)
or use normals (which doesn’t really affect the model)

What i’m looking for is to use monochromatic images to draw verts (similar to knife tool)

I am bad at explaining these things, does anyone know a solution?

2

there is no way to use a texture to increase vertex count at render time

btw, why can’t you use both displacement and bumpmapping?

3

To use monochromatic images to affect verts, use a grid or subdivided plane, aplly the image as a texture, then press the Noise button as required in the Edit buttons for the mesh.

Sonix.

4

I am bad at explaining things.

Firstly, I don’t want to do it at rendering time, i want do let it affect the model.

I want it to “trace” around the monochromatic part of the image, creating vertices as it passes each edge (like the knife tool does)

This way, if you applied noise (or displacement) it would rise or fall at the right point. (not a close approximation)

5

So basicly you want to convert image to mesh?

Can’t be done in Blender, at the moment at least. (as far I know)

If I’m not mistaken there are some apps that can do something like that, but I’ve understood, that is not very effective adn you must do lot of tweaking to the model afterwards.

6

No, I don’t want to convert an image to a mesh…
well, sort of…

say you have a subdivided plane to form a grid,
then you have a monochromatic image of a black filled circle on a white background,

apply the texture to the grid, and if you use nor the circle “appears” to rise
if you use noise, it affects the grid, however it rises only the blocks the circle is in, so you get a kind of pixelated circle. (subdividing more lowers the pixelation when using noise)
and finally, displacement does the same as noise, only not actually affecting the mesh, and still with the same pixelation problems.

The cause is the edges of the circle don’t exactly meet the vertex points of the grid, so it chooses the closest one.

What I want is…
Say you were to use the knife tool to trace around the circle, so that the vertex points of the grid matched the edges of the circle, then when you used displacement or noise, the circle would rise perfectly. (well near perfect)

ok, in reality, I spose i just wish boolean operations worked. Cas then you could just make the image into an object and use boolean.

7

I perfectly understand what you want to do, and I recommend just tracing your image with beziers or nurbs.

8

try booleans

marin