making a tire? disp map

Support Basics & Interface
1

i have ablack and white image, i want to apply that to the edge of a tire and then have the vertices match the hiehgts?

thanks

brendan

2

Make sure you have a tire with enough subdivisions on it to do an accurate displacement map. Make sure you map the texture to the specific part of the tire you want to have the map on. Next load the image as a texture. In map to map it to ‘disp’ for displacement, and change the slider lower down. That should do it, and if you need more detailed steps please reply.

3

I happened to find a TIRE tutorial here

http://www.olafarnold.com/cartiretutorial/tiretutor1-en.html

4

Spin that is a good tutorial, however i think it could be better if the tread were not added as an extra step.

The warp tool is also very good for tire creation. You can make one section of tread, extrudedup it, and then wrap it around the tire. This way the tread is part of the tire and won’t look like it’s sticking out. here is an example of my first attempt with this techniqe
http://www.eaemedia.com/blender/mustang/tiretest.jpg
sort of like this 3ds tutorial… shift-w to warp the tread around cursor(center of tire) in blender :slight_smile:
http://www.3dkingdom.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=483

5

If you go with displacement mapping, be sure and read the tutorial on Blender’s home site here:

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Displacement_mapping.37.0.html

The more detailed the tread pattern is, the higher subdivision surface level will need to be.

6

Also be very sure that you actually need either a bump-map or a displacement-map to achieve the visual effect that you require. In quite a number of cases you’ll find that you don’t. All that you need is a smooth cylinder, made with a spindup’d curve, with an appropriate texture painted on it. Only if (and when) the camera is actually close enough does the geometry actually have to be any more complicated. When the camera is mid-range, a bump-map will do nicely. If the tire is rotating, under typical lighting conditions, bump and/or displacement maps are, I would expect, almost never required.

Your first temptation as a 3D modeler is to actually model the real geometry. And you are rewarded with very long render-times. When you look at the actual pixels produced by all this work… “there is an easier way.” A nice procedural texture might just produce an equivalent, or at least equally-suitable, pattern of light-and-dark.