Creating (rendering) displacement / height maps from 3d geometry?

[rd1010]

I'm interested to create my own displacement maps from 3d geometry, for example if I had 3d text I would want to take a render of it and then use that to create a displacement map.. I'm not sure exactly how to do this and am having trouble finding tutorials but I gather it is possible by taking a render with the correct lighting and somehow converting it to the black to white shading necessary for the height map. Has anyone else done this... any links to a tutorial or other info? thanks for any help

[Macha]

Well, maybe there's a better way but you could just render out a depth image plane with an orthographic camera.

[brianburke]

I'm interested to create my own displacement maps from 3d geometry

I've found it handy to do this with raytracing and mantra -u http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/ShaderUnwrap.

You can trace out a ray from the surface you want to displace and return the distance to the template object. With mantra -u, you can store this value in your texture. If you use a 16 or 32 bit floating point image format for your texture (exr, tiff, pic), you can get extremely close to the exact shape of your template object.

I attached a little example of transferring hi res geo to a displacement map on a low res mesh using this technique.

Edited September 9, 2009 by brianburke

[brianburke]

sorry, forgot the filedispbake.hip

[junaid]

you can simply use bounding box expression in point sop, isn't?

Cheers,

Junaid

[rd1010]

Cool, thanks for the responses, I'm checking out the different ways to do it

[rd1010]

edit: answered my own question

Edited September 13, 2009 by rd1010