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Complex texture? Displacement? What is that?

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, October 11, 2012 Under: General
Hey all!

Seems I might have been a smidge too technical yesterday, haha.

A complex texture is a combination of a bunch of textures forming one result, like making the SA flag from a bunch of blend textures:


Every complex texture, will have a node system (it's DNA, building blocks, if you will), and a node system, looks like this for wood (if it is complex, and not the simple wood texture applied, which has no knots):


Displacement is what it says, something that is shifted from it's original spot. That, in correlation to the displacement modifier, it looks like this before it was applied:


(displaying the plane's actual detail)



And like this, after it was applied:


As you can see, your object's physical detail determines the detail it has for alterations. You can't get more physical changes than your object's physical detail level.

Now, what makes yesterday's discovery so great is that you now get the physical changing of the object. It's the difference between this:

(bump mapping = giving the appearance and reaction to light of physical texture where there is none)

and this:

(True displacement = using a texture to physically alter the object,)

The feature from yesterday, enables you to create textures not easily found and even animate them using displacement, like on the flags at the start of the post. The curved waves that flow out to the corners of the flag is a complex texture that was animated to create more subtle waves beyond the wave modifier's movement.

It is a very very useful feature and really something to write home about, lol.

While bump-mapping is great, it is only there to give you detail your PC is not able to process physically (which is fantastic, but faking detail and movement sometimes just doesn't work). It is on projects like the flags that true displacement is a need, otherwise it would look horrible.

I hope that clears up any misunderstandings from yesterday (^^,). I am about helping you, not confusing you, hahaha.

Have a great one!!

Thank YOU!!!!!!

In : General 


Tags: explain  clarity  flags  displacement  bump-mapping  physical detail  detail  movement 
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