Stuff you can do with displace

[Doug Nelson]

Hoping to replicate the success of my "Stuff you can do with clouds" thread, I propose posting examples of results obtained using a single application of displace.

Start with your own image and dmap, do whatever you like to the image without displacing it, then the final step must be applying displace.

Let's see what you can do!

[Stroker]

Hey, I recently did something really cool with Displace. It's so uber cool that I actually managed to amaze myself.

I'll write myself a note to come back later and post it up.

[Stroker]

One day I was playing with mapping channels in 3DS Max. I realized that all I was doing with the mapping channels was moving pixels around. Since I can do that with Displace, I decided to try to hack mapping channels using Displace.

So I set up my Max material to spit out D-Maps. Once I got that into Photoshop, it was just a hop, skip, and a jump.

Using this technique, I can quickly create a bunch of mapping channels and get them into Photoshop for all sorts of masking, adjusting, and tweakage. Give me a head model, a bunch of head shots, and it goes fairly quickly to blend them (in Photoshop) for a final texture.

Photoshop or Max? Depends on the task at hand, and Photoshop wins for masking, blending, and adjusting. You know, you can't exactly use Selective Colour in Max.

The only down-side is that Displace gets rather inaccurate at larger pixels distances and percentages. To get around this limitation, I hacked out my own version of Displace that is pixel perfect accurate out to 2048 pixels. But that's another story.

Displace still rocks.
At least, the idea behind it still does.

[Stroker]

Displace for painterly effects. To make the D-Map, I used Chalk & Charcoal and Emboss. The final image itself is nothing but Displace.