Displacement Modifier Test
Here’s a simple, yet pleasing example of Blender’s Displacement Modifier done by Robert J. Tiess (RobertT).
He writes:
For the texture I used the wood (ring noise) texture with low turbulence to establish the concentric sand lines.
After applying the modifier I used proportional editing to draw out some of the rings and alter height in different areas.
The ground mesh contains less than 80k verts.
The real-time displacement modifier is a lot of fun to work with and opens up many new possibilities.
Nicely done. You can view the original forum thread, here.
…. also his “simple example” is looking great !
The tool also allows for semi-realtime dispmapping: you can paint the dispmap with painting 2D or even 3D) inside Blender, set the modifier to use UV coordinates for the mapping. All you got to do, is forcing Blender to redraw the geometry.
I already love it
OK so I finally got to figuring out the modifier. It looks great thanks fro the post :)
Very nice results, too bad you had to apply the modifier before you could deform the mesh. There was some user discussion the other day in the developer’s forum comparing Blender’s modifiers to modifiers in Max. I thought it was a silly comparison to make at the time, but since then I’ve been running into situations like this were an edit-mesh-modifier would be very handy.
The way I see it an edit mesh modifier would be similar to combining the multires feature with the modifier stack. You could apply a subsurf modifier at n levels, then add a edit-mesh to give yourself access to the derived geometry. Clicking on the edit in edit mode button would allow you to modify one level of the modified mesh, and like multires all the changes would propagate to higher and lower levels. To use this though the first item in the modifier stack needs to be an edit-mesh – so you con still edit the original mesh. Now imagine if instead of subsurf you added a displacement or lattice modifier – you would have ultimate control over the ultimate appearance of your mesh, and without destroying you base mesh!
When I first used 3DS Max I thought the edit mesh modifier was obtuse and awkward. I still think it is overkill in most circumstances and is lousy default behavior, but now I finally get how it is useful. I think an edit-mesh-modifier would be a tremendous addition to Blender’s modifier stack, and should be at the top of the list for the Google Summer Of Code!