Welcome to using displacement maps in this video you will create real detail using a texture.
So we're going to take this texture and use it to actually modify geometry.
So we're going to use a displacement map to alter geometry.
You'll understand that you need geometry first in order to modify of it's not there.
Then there is nothing to modify.
We use the displacement influence in blender render and will also use the displacement modifier in a
similar manner as well with see how you can do that render time.
And we'll see how you can do in reality as well.
Now talking about reality there is an important reality and that's the fact that going back to the point
that in order to do this you need geometry in order to modify.
So it's not suitable for certain things.
So it's not really suitable for generating a final brick wall for instance it would be quite tempting
to use a black and white chequered image so to speak to produce a brick wall.
But at a very high poly count is required.
Now that's fine if your computer can handle it.
Mine can't.
For doing hey you're going to have a supercomputer.
In fact you end up with a brick wall.
Being a silly silly high polygon count when it's completely unnecessary.
What would be better is combining a low polygon bumping map so it's almost the right shape but not quite.
With a nother displacement map or even a normal map and will get onto those shortly in order to fake
some additional geometry as well where we can't really have too many polygons.
Now they are useful for applying details.
For example scales on a lizard fish or Dragon how or if you don't have a bump map yet we can use a generated
one to create geometry and then bake that back or come onto baking very soon.
We can bake that back down into a texture and then reapply that so there's lots of techniques we can
use going backwards forwards.
Now talking about creating geometry.
It they are great for creating or generating geometry and then of course optimizing so not leaving that
is your final model leaving it as a halfway point to get used to certain positions much more quickly
than it would be possible to do otherwise.
And they're great for larger items like touraine where fine detail is not required.
With a large train you can make it Bumpy very quickly by using displacement maps.
So let's go play with displacement maps now and applying them and hop over into blender.
Okay so we're over in blender and there are a couple of things to show you the first way of doing this
displacement is only going to happen at render time.
So that's either when you're in the rended view of your view ports your 3D view poor or when you go
hit F 12 or go to render and render image.
Okay so we'll start off with Blender render so we need to switch our rendering engine to a render and
once we've done that we've got to keep in front of us.
Let's go create a texture.
In order to use now I'm going to be really quick about this and I'm going to use a generated texture
tone and go to our textures tab and go new.
I'm going to go to where it is type and change that to valeri Noise.
Now I've chosen or annoy simply because I know it exists on cycles as well so I can show you something
that's very similar.
Now that we've done that we need to go to the OR.
Sorry you need to scroll down have the material.
Yes we got the material so we can scroll down.
No need to go to material first for this lot to appear and I'm going to unstick colour because I don't
want it to affect the colour and unrealistic displace and turn the display up as much as possible.
And again we dont see anything at the moment we need to switch in surrendered mode.
And that is not looking too great at the moment.
Its had zero effect on our model.
We look up and down weve got text here type none.
That's why that's changed back to boring.
There we go it's doing the displacement.
That's I wanted it to do and it's only moved some.
Oh yes we've only got eight vertices in total to move so it can only move eight vertices even at render
time.
So what will need to do here is give it some more vertices to actually start moving about.
Now of course when we're dealing with a cube there are several ways to add more geometry to the model.
We could go in and just add more geometry.
I could subdivide that's one quick way but I'm going to use a subdivision surface modifier that is going
to change this cube into more of a ball shape.
But we will see that this is the effect we get I'm going to zoom in and have a look at almost set the
shading to smooth.
That is a pretty cool affect and very quick.
I haven't done anything to set this up other than those few quick settings.
Now do bear in mind this is at render time so we switch the viewport to solid mode.
It still looks like that board.
If we go back to rendered mode you'll notice that this is what it looks like in the viewport.
But when we go and render it it kind of looks horrible.
And the reason for that is in the subsurface modifier settings the render settings are only set to two
subdivisions.
If I set that back at six and hit the render it looks the same as it does in the viewport.
So there's something to watch out for there.
So let's have a quick look now at the cycle's variant of this.
Now this is an experimental feature so we're only going to go over it very quickly and I suggest that
after turning your experimental features on you turn them off again after we've played with it.
So I'm going to have a 3D view open and I'm going to have a node editor open.
So the first thing to do is on the feature sets on your render properties change it from supported to
experimental and be warned from here.
Dragons may approach and destroy everything.
Not really but it does enable some features that may crash blend so used with caution.
Okay so now we've done that's what we need to do is go in Apply the texture to displacement.
So first of all we need to make sure we've got a material on a go ahead and click use notes and in the
node editor we can see we have a material output and this diffuse.
That's fine.
We need to go ahead and add ourselves a texture.
And here we go we have four annoying again and I'm going to plug the factor onto the colour and just
check what it looks like.
That's what it looks like.
You can see there that this is a bit larger than it was before some of the increase to this scale.
There we go.
That's about right.
So now I'm going to take this factor and plug it into displacement instead.
Now this will initially give us like a bump map rather than actually changing the geometry at render
time.
However if we go to the meche Data properties here and scroll down there's this new area here where
we can see displacement.
Now I am just going to do a quick tweak and on our lamp settings make it use the sun so it's just a
bit brighter and a bit more uniform light across that says Click on our object.
Again go to the data property scroll all the way down and displacement and as you can see at the moment
it is set to.
If we change that to true we can see it's actually changing the underlying geometry.
But once again it does require geometry in order to work so items subdivisions down you can see that
eventually it ends up back at a cube again and not this wonderful shape.
Now in fact if you have both turned on.
So if we go back to the meche data here and go to displacement go to method and do both.
We get a a much crisper and cleaner appearance.
I'm not sure which one I actually like the best.
I think I do like this one but both obviously have their places.
Now bear in mind once again this only appears at render time.
Not when you're looking at the model and working in solid mode.
Not when you're working in text mode or even material mode so that's worthwhile bearing in mind.
Now let's go in and use these subdivision surface modifier to give us some geometry and actually displacement
modify as well so we can see what's going on in the viewport.
So I'm going to unplug this of Laura I texture.
I'm going to get rid of it and I am also going to go to my render propertys and change the feature set
back to support it because I don't want blender crashing on me.
That's quite disastrous when that happens.
So I'm going to move this window up and get rid of it.
And there we go back to our ball and we are in material mode at the moment some just going to switch
back to solid.
So now we're in here.
We can go to our modifiers tab and add in a displacement modifier and the displacement modifier is under
the deform column.
It's the fifth one down there displace.
Now you see it just gets slightly larger to begin with and that is simply because it is just displacing
everything as if it had a uniform texture applied to it.
Now bear in mind you can do you rhône textures if you'd like.
In this case I'm going to use another generated one.
So in the texture's area of the display some of them are hit.
Or is it already stored.
That's the first things that are put in generating another one.
So let's go to news this thing.
I think there looks like a paracetamol pill or something but I click on that little icon there and he's
actually taken this over to the texture's tab and under this dropdown we can see we've got displace
brush and brush mask.
At this point we do want to make sure it's only affecting the display.
I wanna click on this drop down here and see there's already two in memory and the techs I think that's
what we were using with the blunderingly so we can click on that and there we go we've got the vore
annoy texture again and we've got some ways of altering it.
So now we've actually got a texture modifying.
Ah geometry we can tweak it's a bit more by going to the modifiers tab and just playing about with them
that the moment we can see what texture it's using the direction so you can actually have all of these
modify in the y direction and you get this kind of I don't know what to describe that as.
But I'll leave.
I'll leave you guys.
No generally discussions if what you think that looks like windswept I think I'm thinking of going to
leave it to normal so it goes out sort of evenly across the entire model text record.
Well if it was a mapped you v texture with very specific displacements i.e. very specific colours we
could go in here and switch this from local to u v and use a u v map.
This group is very powerful it allows us to control what parts of our model are affected by this particular
modifier.
And we've got mid level and we can see that by moving that changes where the modifier is taking place
and the strength of course changes the actual impact that this is making on our model.
So if it's set really low we get a nice simple defective it's set really high.
We get a more explosive effect.
Of course if you go into the negative numbers instead of a V blacks representing low points they start
to represent high points.
Then you get a completely different effect.
In fact I think that when you move it out like that it looks like one of those flowers.
Is it a hyacinthe.
I don't know I don't know my flowers at all so I'm probably completely wrong there.
So there's lots you can do and it's very quick you can see how quickly we've managed to actually get
to this point with very little modification of the geometry in fact still underneath remember it is
a cube.
Now what you can do is in the modifiers tab itself.
There's a little thing that looks like a cube with four dots on it and that will display the modifier
in edit mode.
And that's kind of fun because when you're in edit mode that does mean now you can grab the C's and
move them about and change the underlying shape that these modifiers are being applied to and obviously
generates new shapes coming from there.
So the other thing we can do here is just try a couple of different textures so we can go into the textures
tab and from vore and I choose noise and wow that looks a mess.
Which isn't surprising.
And we can go into the modifiers tab go down to the displacement.
Having it this way around have it set that way round.
And while we've got ourselves a ball rush or or spiky Caterpillar or something and we can look at this
in render mode as well.
Oh I've lost it for a moment.
There we go.
So we're looking at it in rendered mode and if we go ahead and render that bar that's quite cool.
So that is like a ball rush on the end of a ball rush.
There's that one thing you know I'm thinking of a thistle or something on those lines.
I don't know.
I'm rambling on now.
And of course that usually means it's time for a challenge.
I'd like you to go ahead and make your ground more interesting.
So what I mean by that I would like you to use the displacement map and the displacement modifier to
create a not so flat ground around your model is just going to create a bit more of a natural feel and
a make it a bit more interesting basically.
And I want you to combine that with something I want you to use vertex grouping to isolate where the
building sits from the bumpy ground and that's going to prevent the inside of the building from getting
bumpiness inside it.
I'm not sure that's technically the right language to use but we don't want undulations underneath the
building itself that needs to be nice and flat just like you would build a real building.
So balsa video now and give that a go.
Okay guys welcome back.
Let's go make some ground more interesting and hop over into a blender.
So I'm going to say goodbye to my fossil for the moment and go and open up my Gothic church that I've
been working on.
So go to the 3-d view and have a look.
How's it coming along pretty well.
I have decided by the way and I might do this on camera or off camera.
I haven't decided yet but this top part at the top here I've actually looked at some reference material
and most of them don't have such fancy tops of them on the actual bell tower itself so that I'll probably
go but the rest of these lovely arch ways will actually remain.
So let's work on this ground sir.
I'm going to click on the ground and it doesn't have any thing and any geometry at the moment now.
A couple of options.
What I want to do first of all is just see if adding a subdivision surface modifier is going to shrink
it too much to with a level of six.
So let's go to the rendered mode and note that looks absolutely fine for the moment.
I may have to adjust the scale of it slightly and bring it out.
There we go.
I'm just doing that by nothink reference.
Really.
So that is looking pretty good.
Let's go and start modifying it.
Let's add a displacement modifier as well.
Hasso is lifted all the way off the ground that's not too great but we'll deal with that in a bit.
Let's add a.
Or is there a texture in memory I can use.
I'm going to use the displacement we've already got linked in.
Wow okay check that out.
It's my church in a mountain range.
I don't think we want the strength quite that high so let's lower it down to maybe point to kibbitz
slightly more realistic.
But what we're missing in here is as you can see it's modifying the ground and doing for church.
Not only does that make it Bumpy inside of that's no good.
Looks like a landslide or something has happened.
But it also means that the church is floating in places as well.
That's no good so we can do this in any order.
But I've chosen to do it around this way simply so I can show you the impact.
If you haven't done it.
So let's go ahead now in order to use virtex Grouping we aren't going to have to apply this modifier.
I don't believe we're going to be able to do any virtex selecting because the only real vertices of
these four on the outside of this plane the i've got so we're going to have to apply that's come apply
in edit mode.
Fair enough.
Apply that.
So now I've got some actual geometry that I can work with a hoppin to edit mode and we can see all the
little squares and I'm simply going to draw around them and remove them so I'm going to go to circles
select and holding down my middle mouse button.
Of course you could select any number of ways.
I'm just going to remove some of the ground around my church or rather some of these verses now.
I don't want it to close because this one gets pulled up.
Remember that it will.
And it is selective the moment remember where virtex Grouping this particular verse sees here.
If that gets pulled up then it's gone to pull up anything connected to it to actually want to make sure
that it's actually going to be quite wide around here.
So this one gets balled up.
It won't affect if this one gets pulled up it will affect So we want to remove those as well in order
to make this work properly.
And that should be okay would do that.
I'm going to go over to my mesh data.
I'm going to scroll down to virtex groups and add a vertical group and I'm going to call it bumb Paean
ground.
Why not.
That is what it's applied to and I'm going to assign sort of an a d select everything and just select
Yeah that's absolutely great.
So now we've got that Verts group assigned we can go to our modifiers.
Virtex group and Bumby ground and there we go.
Now on we hop out of edit mode the actual ground itself around the church should be flat which it is.
Now we can see at this point there is some sheer drops around it but that's okay because it means that
the ground inside and that it's placed on is absolutely fine of course now we can go round and tweak
a load of stuff so we make the church sit down or we can make the church sit up and we can see here
a bit more clearly what the mid level does if it's set in the middle of them it's going to oscillate
either side of this midpoints that's the area that's flat essentially at the moment.
And obviously the strength.
I think point two is a little high I am going to go for point one not just round that quickly and see
what we've got.
Well maybe points to.
Yeah I quite like that.
But I am obviously not going for that low poly look song I'm going to open up my tool shelf and all
the operator panels go is self very large that small are going to turn on smooth shading that is looking
pretty good.
How did you guys get on.
Did you try this technique on any of perhaps the block work in your building as well where you could
start adding detail to individual areas and making it a bit more unique as well.
Make sure you show your work in the discussions and I will see you guys in the next lecture.