noise displacement with "direction"

[Visor66]

Hi guys,

Im struggling with an idea I have about a displacement shader I could really need for my current project. We have built a painterly rendering system in Houdini based on sprites for our rendering and I orient the sprites along tangents I give to the geometry. The sprites are then scattered over the geometry with a scatter SOP. What I need now is a displacement of the underlying geometry with an orientation based on the same geometry tangents. I thought of a noise displacement that has frequency in just one direction so I get long streaks and these streaks should be oriented along the tangents...Is that understandable? Well I have spent some time now during this project using vex and vops but Im still new to this so Im in desperate need for some directions to go. I also wonder if its possible at all, but why wouldnt it!? What Im doing at the moment is rendering a mask pass with the sprites in different greyscale tones to reproject onto the geometry to get my displacement. Well it works but its not the most elegant solution and I think it could be improved with a nice displacement shader!

So if one would have an idea that gives me a starting point I would be more then happy to hear it!

Thanks in advance

Pascal

[Visor66]

I had a play with the waves VOP. It gives me control over the direction of the waves. I tried to pipe my tangent values into the shader and it does something, direction of the waves changes, just not right, the waves get all messy! I will investigate more and still hope for someone to give me a hint....Someone? Anyone?

thanks guys!

[rd1010]

Not sure I understood exactly what you are trying to do... isn't this a UV mapping issue as that would control the direction of any sort of mapping (such as a displacement)....

Edited September 6, 2009 by rd1010