Real displacement mapping

I am afraid to ask, because I think I know the answer.

Is there any way at all to make a displacement map affect the mesh for real? I know various texture maps and noise do it…

I ask because I am design terrain grids for a game, and I need more than optical illusion. A true displacement map would help not only in modelling the battle maps, but may also possibly serve a dual purpose as serving as a height map for collision detection on the Ogre engine…

I would much rather just paint out hills in grey scale, then have to actually model them.

Maybe in the test build of Blender?

If you texture something and then press ‘noise’ multiple times in the Edit Buttons, the vertices of the mesh will displace themselves. IS this what you mean?

Unfortunately, that does not give me the kind of control I would need. I would need to be able to paint a grayscale map, and then have the mesh itself deform according t that map, so I could then port the newly formed mesh to Ogre. The nosie thing does a random formation… but I am going to need to be able to model hills, and flat roads, etc…

I am prety sure it can’t be done, not without a script anyway.

Have you tried S68’s Blender World Forge? I’m not entirely sure of what it does, but give it a go!

Thanks Xarton… I’m gonna see if I find something in the scripts section tomorrow… I say Terry noise, which used weight painting. Perhpas there is a script somewhere already…

…It’s just for some reason I thought the displacement mapping was already a real mesh deformation, because of soem of the noise map terrain generation I had played with did it.

Thanks Xarton… I’m gonna see if I find something in the scripts section tomorrow… I saw Terry noise, which used weight painting. Perhaps there is a script somewhere already…

…It’s just for some reason I thought the displacement mapping was already a real mesh deformation, because of soem of the noise map terrain generation I had played with did it.

Ahh found something at the 3d-dadelo site… life is good.

Doh, double post

Um… no, your actually wrong man, try it again.

Noise does just that, it applies deform based on grayscale, nothing random about it…

I get great terrain results from assiging a cloud texture with high size and hitting “noise”.

You can also do complex images if you have a depth map.

Try sub-divding the plane a bunch of times, you should get smooth and non-random results.

Another thing is that an actual displacement mapping IS more than an “optical illusion”.

Perhaps you are mixing up nor(bump) mapping and displacement mapping… nor is the optical illusion which uses shading, and displacement actually does move vertex’s around, it just does it at render time.

But pressing noise will yield the same as displacement mapping pre-render time…

Have a read of https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25814

Hopefully this will work with some modifications. Rob used a grayscale photo to generate settings to use for making a 3D relief carved in wood. It uses heightfields to create a 3D mesh.

https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36528

All you need to know

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

Problem solved, i hope.

I don’t need it at render time, unfortunately, or I would use it, I need it at mesh export time.

Unfortunately it won’t.
Unless something has changed recently that I’ve missed, displacement mapping moves verts out and in along their normal, while noise moves them strictly up and down.
So while it’s the same on a subdivided plane, it’s a different thing on say, a sphere.

http://img213.echo.cx/img213/9895/image223uj.th.png

Wooo HOOOO! Chugga chugga chugga chugga Wooo Hooo!

Thank God for the folks at www.dedalo-3d.com, and their true displacement script. Last updated sept of 2003 I think.

It meant I had to reinstall the Gimp, and it may mean I’ll be forced to throw out Paint Shop Pro 9, and use the Gimp exclusively, (gawd how I hate the Gimp’s interface), but it worked it worked it worked!

I see 100’s of hours of my life reclaimed!

I also tried ANT and dispaint, but they were not quite useful for this particular case.

A.N.T.Deformer: ‘vertexpaint’ noise on your mesh.
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35881

A.N.T.Landscape:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35882

Its callled “True Displacement” I tried it do NeOmega and while the concept seemed like JUST what I needed in practice it did not do what I wanted to do. You had to have a certain type of .tga greyscale file to make work. I tried tgas from Ifranview that I had converted to grayscale tgas from a colore jpg and it would not work. The author suggest theGimp. Ok I tried that too(importing a color rgb and converting it to a grayscale tga in theGimp) that did not work either. If I followed the quickstart tutorial EXACTLY using theGimp True Displacement did work. But I already have LOTS of things I want to convert to a truely displaced mesh. I guess I am out of luck. BTW I wanted to do this for the blender game engine, so I guess my objective was the same as yours but you a using OGRE3D instead.

Its callled “True Displacement” I tried it do NeOmega and while the concept seemed like JUST what I needed in practice it did not do what I wanted to do. You had to have a certain type of .tga greyscale file to make work. I tried tgas from Ifranview that I had converted to grayscale tgas from a colore jpg and it would not work. The author suggest theGimp. Ok I tried that too(importing a color rgb and converting it to a grayscale tga in theGimp) that did not work either. If I followed the quickstart tutorial EXACTLY using theGimp True Displacement did work. But I already have LOTS of things I want to convert to a truely displaced mesh. I guess I am out of luck. BTW I wanted to do this for the blender game engine, so I guess my objective was the same as yours but you a using OGRE3D instead.[/quote]

I did have to reinstall the Gimp, just to have control over the tga so it would not be compressed. But you can take any image, and convert it to the right grayscale .tga format in the gimp.

I think it was worth it. Plus I have seen some fantastic tutorials on texture creating in the gimp, so I may give the gimp more attention.

True displacement I think works fantastically well, with a GUI, and a counter to give you a countdown.

Have someone the script?
I tryed to download from: http://www.dedalo-3d.com/download/truedisp.zip , but the file isnt available anymore. Please someone uploadit in this forum. Thanks.

Just go to http://www.dedalo-3d.com/ there is a link on the left hand side.

sorry – this link is broken as well :frowning:

GreyBeard

You don’t need a script for working on a flat plane, noise works just fine, as has been pointed out. Try it, it is built into blender and is quite possibly the easiest thing to use. ian

Question, why do you all use GIMP instead of Photoshop (I’m a Photoshop user)? I’m not bashing GIMP or anything, just curious… :confused: