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.

[Stroker]

Another painterly. This time, I used a custom brush to kind of control the apparent strokes. I also cheated a little by by using Displace by Hue, but it's still in the spirit.

[Doug Nelson]

I like the idea of using filters to generate a dmap. I only wish Adobe would update the displace filter so it was quicker, more interactive, etc. Running it as a smartfilter helps a little, but not a lot.

Any filter developers reading this, there's a product idea here.

[Stroker]

A few months ago, FilterMeister gained the ability to use DLLs. I just pulled a several day marathon getting to know these new functions and getting to know DevIL.

Earlier today I managed to use FM + DevIL to load an image and output.

I have an older filter called Uber Displace that uses BMP files for for the D-Map (all I had available at the time). I just took the new DevIL code for a spin in Uber Displace and it bloody works. Loaded some PSD and JPG files no prob for a D-Map.

So far it has only choked on two understandable points:
- One of the PSD files that I tried loading was saved in Lab mode.
- The other PSD file did not have the Image Preview saved.

New Displace Stroker-style on the horizon. Once I get a little more fiddling done, I'll take it to the Software sub-forum.

[Doug Nelson]

That sounds cool, I look forward to seeing your results.