From what I can tell so far, displacement mapping is generating a lot of vertices on a mesh and moving it around so the shadows a mesh casts are as accurate as possible. However, I don’t see the difference between it and just sculpting in the details with sculpt brushes. Is there a difference?
One is procedural/dynamic. The other is not.
Hope that helped.
- Sculpting manipulated the geomtry directly… even adding geo is possible…
- Displacement is usually restricted to “along the normals” and and so “easy” to implement (“just” drawing the height…)
- (not mentiond yet) Normal-mapped-displace usually is made via high-poly to low poly baking… and so using sculpting… but there are ways to manipulate the normals and/or the height only (but normals has to be normalized afterwards)…
Anyway:
Sometimes “just simply drawing some displacement” is an easier/faster workflow to add some details…