Two-Way Displacement Mapping

[DJ_Boxer]

I have a problem with regards to Displacement Mapping: I want to say take a Box and lets say that I want to put displaced text on there where "In" is displaced down while directly under that is "Out" where it is displaced out on all sides. How would I create the texture in GIMP to do this?

DJ

[anim]

you can create texture where background is 50% grey "IN" is black "OUT" is white

notice that many pre-built displaceent materials offers different modes of displace direction, just choose default (up & down: gray = no displace)

if you are building your own shader

then after you import texture in SHOPs just use Fit Range VOP from 0-1 to -1,1 range then you can use it for displacement

if you are working with floating point image you can do all this in your image editor, just make background 0 "IN" -1 "OUT" 1

it will not be looking good as an image since most viewers displays only 8-bit, but it will work for displacements perfectly

[old school]

If you are using any of the Materials that have Displacements in Houdini, you will have options as to how the gray scale values drive the displacements.

The default is black = negative displace, gray 0.5 = no displace, white = positive displace.

So flood your displacement image with 0.5 gray first then paint to black for inwards displacements and paint to white for outwards displacements.

Hope that helps.