Creating Displacement maps?

solarview

Hi All.

Have a question on the "content-creation" process.

To start with, let me just say, that I am certainly NOT a 3D Content Artist. Or anything close. Just trying to acheive an orignal look for a painting I'm composing. So I'm defintely feeling my way around in the dark here a bit. I have played around very minimally with Blender. And I haven't tried Hexagon either. Only downloaded it a week or two ago, so not really famliair with what all it might offer to this equation..

I have purchased a number of "Wings" sets over the years, through Daz, and in working with them, I think I get the basics of how they work. Essentialy, a "plane" is the base of the wing, and has a created "painted or vector artwork" laid upon that, and then a "displacement layer" on top to add the textural depth to the artwork for 3D rendering. Correct so far??

OK, so with that being said, what I've done, is I've taken one of the set's "wings" planes (in theis case, the goal here is to create a custom and unique set of Fairy / Dragonfly-type wings.) and in Photoshop created my own original design to be placed on the existing wings plane. The idea being to be able to render the lighting and shaodws for a scene for a Painting composition, but to have the wings be my own orginal art design, versus a stock-content dragonfly wing.

My custom wing design works fine on the original plane, That part I've figured out. Renders pretty close as intended. What I haven't figured out, and thus the question of this post, is about the "Displacement Maps". Creating textural depth to the wing. I do know for instance, how to create in Photoshop a "Bevel and Emboss" / "Drop Shadow" effect to get a dimentional look.  And to get the sunlight at the angle I want, and all that. So now looking for suggestions or guidance on how to create that textural look with a Displacement Map for my "Fairy / Dragonfly-styled" wing design. The wing design is simply a colored dragonfly-ish look, with detail vein-work. Intende to be unique to my fairies. So would I simply create a png with an applied "Bevel and Emboss" effect that gets laid over the vector wing design? If so, would you just set it at "0" or "180" for the default angle of light? And then Daz Studio determines the rest with your scene's light settings? Or am I completely off-base on this assessment?  :-)

And please, if you have technical suggestions here, layman's terms would really help. :-)

Thanks.

-  Sol

 

Richard Haseltine

If you are aiming for the look of ribbing  you need a line of white down the middle, or lighht-grey to white is wanting variable height, fading to mid grey or black where the rib  meets the membrane - grey value is equal to height. then you apply that to displacement and adjust the minimum (black) and maximum (white) numbers to say what height the shades mean (setting is in cm). Note that for Iray you will need to convert the wings to SubD (Edit>Figure>Geometry>Convert to SubD) and adjust the Render SubD level to give the displacement something to work with. 3Delight doesn't require that step. Displacement maps are usually 16 bit greyscale to avoud stair-casing, where each level of grey forms a visible plateau, but you may finbd your relief is low enough for that not to matter.

solarview

Richard Haseltine said:

If you are aiming for the look of ribbing  you need a line of white down the middle, or lighht-grey to white is wanting variable height, fading to mid grey or black where the rib  meets the membrane - grey value is equal to height. then you apply that to displacement and adjust the minimum (black) and maximum (white) numbers to say what height the shades mean (setting is in cm). Note that for Iray you will need to convert the wings to SubD (Edit>Figure>Geometry>Convert to SubD) and adjust the Render SubD level to give the displacement something to work with. 3Delight doesn't require that step. Displacement maps are usually 16 bit greyscale to avoud stair-casing, where each level of grey forms a visible plateau, but you may finbd your relief is low enough for that not to matter.

Thanks for the reply, Richard. Your explaination sounds like it works like Photoshop "masks", as in "White Revelas, Black conceals" and thus the "gradients" are creating the look of shape and depth.

In looking at the sample files I referenced, they actually have 4 files for each wing, labled as follows...

nameWing_T1,jpg (the main artwork)

nameWing_Bum,jpg (BumpMap, I assume.) Your expaination sounds like it would be the "bump Map", correct? Or is it the "Displacement Map"? 

nameWing_Tran,jpg (Transparency?)

nameWing_Spec,jpg (Specular?)

Are thes 4 image jpegs the standard for most rendered elements? Or is, say "Transparency", an extra element? 

My design I'm working with is a basic vector piece with colored elelments and with fills, and layer FX added, created in Photoshop. So I do have the ability to seperate it out into seperate layers. Just trying to figure out how so, and how much "bump" and such would be added to those layers to get a desired effect. Is there rules of thumb with it?

FYI, if you have a good recommend read on htis subject, please feel free to send a link my way.

Thanks, man. Much appreciated.

- Sol

Richard Haseltine

Yes, that's what the files are - base colour (or diffuse colour), bump (which is much the same as dsiplaement when it comes to creation, but doesn't actually move the mesh and so doesn't need additional levels of division for Iray), transparency (exactly like a mask in PS), and specularity (how shiny the surface is, from 0 at black to a value set in the shader at white). Those are the typical maps for a basic 3delight shader, but there are other types that may be used for different shaders (subsurface strength, normal - a super bump map, ambient, tip-coat etc.).