Hey blender artists, I know the wording in the title is a bit awkward but I’ll do my best to explain whats going on. I’m trying to use a megascans pbr decal of dirty rags in my scene and I thought simply applying the included displacement map to a subdivided plane and then using the opacity mask with a vertex weight mix to delete the wasted (transparent) geometry would get me a nice looking prop. It almost did but I ran into a problem with the displacement modifier. Since this is a pile of rags sitting on the floor, I want my displacement to push vertices positively along the normals. In other-words I want a flat bottom and a displaced top. I could almost swear that I’ve done this successfully in the past but for whatever reason I just cant get it to work. No matter what I do I end up with the low-points disappearing into the floor. Adjusting the mid-level on the modifier simply pushes the whole model up and down and when I enable the color ramp check box on the displacement texture the displacement effect disappears. I’m by no means a novice user at this point and feel like there’s no way I’ve gotten through over a year of using blender for my client projects without running into and solving this issue by now. I’m really hoping that somebody can let me know just how obvious what I’m missing is. Thanks!
Setting the midlevel to 0 is the correct way of doing it. The issue you describe of it appearing to move your whole model up is likely due to few (or no) pixels in the height map that are near 0. You might be able to find a midlevel setting between 0 and 0.5 that gives roughly the look you want, otherwise you need to edit the height map so significant areas have little or no displacement (aka, are close to 0)
I was afraid this was the root of it but was hoping that wouldn’t be the case as in my experience these mega-scans assets work great out of the box… Thanks though