Displacement Mapping

For my next personal tutorial, I decided that I wanted to learn more about displacement mapping and how it differs from bump mapping. I read about displacement mapping here (pg. 235 in the Google book if the link doesn't take you directly there). The pages in this book taught be about bump mapping and how it differs from displacement mapping. Displacement mapping is more realistic, however it is more processor intensive (as is the case with everything in Maya). Thus, displacement mapping is something I would use sparingly. I used this tutorial to learn about how to create a displacement map.

The above image is of a bump map with a noise texture. As you can see, it creates a pretty good effect, but the edges of the polygon mesh are still completely smooth, which is not totally realistic.

In the picture above, the sphere on the left still has the bump map. The sphere on the right as a displacement map with a noise texture. You can see that the edges here are actually rough, like they should be. However, it is pretty obvious that the displacement is way too strong.

So, all I did was lower the alpha gain value for the noise texture file to reduce the intensity of the displacement. However, the displacement still looks a little bit blocky and low resolution.

To fix this problem, I just increased the number of subdivisions on the sphere. However, by increasing the number of faces it makes this displacement method even more resource intensive.

Another cool thing that I learned is that you can go to Modify>Convert>Displacement to Polygons to make the displacement into an actual polygon mesh. Below is a picture of the wireframe of this new mesh; it is obvious that this method can create a very high poly mesh and will slow down Maya.

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All in all, this tutorial taught me a new way to make objects look bumpy in a way that is a bit more realistic than bump mapping. I would definitely like to practice more with this technique and use it more if my computer will be able to handle it.