I’m currently doing a visualisation of one of my company’s products (as always :D). This is the first time I’m using Blender’s displacement function (for the circuit board you can see below) - and after a bit of tweaking, it works great now. I just took a photo and made a displacement map for the components.
The body of this USB device is made of transparent plastic (white/blue), so you can see the circuit board from the outside.
I will post an update soon but the rendering times eat up my machine ;).
Very Cool!
I also will be doing electrical visualizations so I will definitely use that technique. Can you give a little more detail on how you did the disp map?
inkndoodles, these are small versions of the two images I use as colour map / displacement map:
These textures are in the circuit board material. The first one is mapped to [Map To] the colour [Col] and the second one to the displacement [Disp]. The displacement function sees the RGB value of 0.5/0.5/0.5 in your image as ‘sea level’ ;). The brighter pixels are, the more your mesh gets displaced outwards and vice versa.
The quality of the displacement depends on the resolution of your mesh, so I used a simple plane, subdevided it a few times and turned on [SubSurf] (with [Subdiv] set to 1). SubSurf is a good technique to get a high resolution mesh at render time while keeping your mesh simple. I positioned the textures with a simple UV map.
This is a screenshot of the mesh and the material settings I used for the displacement channel:
I think there are many ways to get good results with displacement, this is just my approach I appreciate any tip and comment.
I appreciate any tip and comment.
